Lost 1/2 of the hard drive

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

I thought I would put Windows 7 on a separate harddrive. Good idea right? WRONG! In trying to get the new HD on the boot menu I made an active partition on the new drive. This seems to have done something to my main drive. At first it wouldn't boot at all even after disconnecting the new drive.

After finally wiping the drive and reformatting a 250GB drive will now show only 120GB. That happened to be the size of the old C drive. The rest of the drive which was D seems to be gone. Doesn't show in fdisk. These are SATA drives.

What happened???? Mad

drc

sol_tion · Joined: Feb 21, 2008 Posts: 1

Hi Donrc,

Check out this link. It may help.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-format-a-new-internal-hard-drive/

Regards,

Sol.

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

Sol,
Thank you sir! That is a good article. But that manage harddrive section was what got me in trouble. I put an active partition on the new harddrive (hoping to be able to switch between OS's in the bios.) Laughing

Bad mistake. The old HD would no longer boot even with the new drive disconnected. I finally had to use fdisk to remove the partitions and then format to reformat the drive. Lost everything on it. I have backups, I just hope they work. That's the thing about backups, you never know if they work until it's too late. javascript:emoticon(' Laughing

')

drc

goretsky · Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2009 1:59 am Post subject:

Hello,

If this is a computer you use to regularly test new operating systems or different configurations, you might want to consider installing a removal drive tray system. That way you can test each operating system on a separate hard disk drive, and, in the event of a problem, it will not affect anything else, since there are no other bootable hard disk drives in the system.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

atenor · Joined: Jan 30, 2004 Posts: 24

There is a program called Gparted here:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/
It is a bootable CD that will allow you to manage partitions and even change the sizes of them.
It's free too.

AG

madgolfer · Joined: Nov 21, 2003 Posts: 3

I keep backups, but so far no need for them. My system is vista 32, vista 64 and win 7 64( which I like) I am presented with three options upon a restart. I am about to try and screw everything up by putting in either suse11 or Ubuntu. i have 2 320gb internals, 3 partitions each, then 2 more usb external. really gets confusing at times, but I keep saying I don't care if it blows up. I may try to find HP hot plugin drive.
bo

system001 · Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 9:51 am Post subject:

sounds like you hid part of the drive by mistake. windows xp, vista, and 7 will all live happily on one drive. typically the worse you will do if you do mess up one of the os's is that you will have to run repair from your install cd/dvd and it will repair the master boot record.

secondly i keep 2 sets of backup files. i have identical 320gig sata drives as my backups and the files are the same on each. i f i download something or create a document or i am saving pictures first i save the items to my desktop. then i copy them to the first backup, then i move them to the second backup. one extra step i know but worth it.

also never let your spyware or antivirus programs scan these drives you may loose data. if there is something in a file that you have on your back(s) your scanners will tell you when you try to open it.

next time try hiren's bootdisk. http://www.givemesolution.org/my-software-collection/36-my-software-co...ction/4

Smile

zzron357 · Joined: Oct 14, 2004 Posts: 43

Hi Donrc,
I don't think you gave us quite enough info on your system and drives.
What OS? etc. If you are running Vista you be able to partition and format
a second drive, as you attempted. One can only guess what might have gone
wrong in the process. I too like G-Parted to partition and resize partitions.
I use a Puppy live cd most often for this. XP can partition a 2nd drive, but no resize. Formats only NTFS and FAT32. Linux folks will add a little swap partition to all drives. I am posting here to leave 2 key messages.

1> Gparted also is super to just examine the hard drive partitions. One can see
hidden partitions, like the little diagnostic partition Dell puts up front, or the recovery partitions, often also first on the disk, but set to pass boot to the 2nd partition.

2> If running Vista, you can resize the primary partition. Vista will prevent you from making "C:" too small. Always use the vista for your work on the primary partition, as many other partition programs don't handle Vista shadow areas well. Once the primary partition is solid, other apps like gparted do a great job on the rest of drive 0 and on drive s 1 and 2 etc. Vista has shadow files all over the place, all hidden. You can see them if you defrag with a 3rd party defrag.
M$ hides them so you won't see what they are doing. Vista SP1 seems to handle the shadow files much better, similar to plugging a memory leak, erasing no longer needed backups.

In Donrc's case he should have been able to see and partition the second drive
w/o affecting drive 0. For win7 an NTFS format would be appropriate, and would best be done using Vista, XP or whatever if on an M$ based system. Just like the
older win os's, win7 will likely edit the boot.ini in the first boot partition for dual boot. Linux, Ubuntu for example, will install Grub to handle boot selection.

Donrc, what hard drive partition arrangement did you want to achieve?
Best wishes, zzron357

donrc · Joined: Feb 16, 2003 Posts: 882

I have 2 hard drives, both SATA. A 250GB and a160. I had XP and Ubuntu on the 250. The 160 was new. In using the XP disk management program I tried putting an active partition on the new drive. After I did this the computer would not boot from the original drive. Why is a mystery to me. I even tried disconnecting the new drive. Still no boot.
So I said to hell with it and formatted the 250 drive and installed Windows 7 on it. That is my only operating system at the moment. Lots of strange things happening, but I'm managing to work through them. If I decide to go back to my old setup I have backups on an external drive. I keep it turned off so it can't get corrupted while I'm playing around.

Thanks for all the posts.

drc