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HI there!
Im reinstalling Windows on my ucles machine and he has 2 harddisks divided into 4 partitions.
I formatted 3 partitions out of 4 and during the reinstallation of Windows, i got a message that the structure was messed up, but windows was able to correct this.
But somehow, windows made the second harddisk invicible. I can only see it when i run FDISK and choose "4. partition information"
Is there a way to let windows show the 2nd harddisk?
I hope you can help me and any thoughts appreciated!Lizette
Is there a primary partition on the 2'nd hard disk? If you boot to the primary hard disk and go to an MS-DOS prompt can you "see" any drive letters on the 2n'd hard disk? I assume the first hard disk has 2 partitions (one active, and bootable). If you type FDISK from DOS and select the 2n'd hard disk and then Large Disk Support, do you see a partition table there with option 4?
Don
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Hi
I think you wanted to have 4 labels (letters) that windows could use ie c: d: e: f: other device - g:
fdisk can see the second hard disk which is good.[ Adding a thought here - (and now just read Don's response it is important to find exactly what you have on the first drive - has windows made the first drive into 2 or 4 partitions? ) If you remove the second hard drive and boot to windows, How many letters do you have and how many partitions are formated. It should be the same, except fdisk will not detect the second drive.
Now insert the slave as the master drive.]
I always get a bit nervous when formatting so I would remove the first hard drive that has been installed making the second drive master (remember to change the jumpers on the back of the slave drive so it can function as the master. Use a bootdisk to get to dos. ) If the drive is not formatted, during bootup it will load tools into a ramdrive. If the has a valid format it should go to prompt without mentioning creating a virtual drive. If the hard drive has a formated partition have a look and see if it contains any resently installed data (ie from your install - just incase.)
then
Fdiskcreate your partitions then reboot and format the newly created partitions.
In the end you will have more than 4 partitions [maybe ?] as the first drive will have 3 that windows will see, plus one not yet formatted. The second drive (remember to change the jumper back for the slave setting) will have as many partitions as you do this time.
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Hi!
I checked with FDISK which letters were assigned: on the first hd i got C and E
on the second hd i have D and F.
I heard that this is done by somebody who also installed the second harddisk.
Windows is showing all the partitions, but with different sizes. The weird thing is that i got (before reinstalling win) these partitions.
C - 4,64 Gb
D - 13,9 Gb
E - 3,19 Gb
F - 5,00 Gb
And now i have:
C - 3,4
D - 5
e - 3,9
F - 5,09
Somehow windows only is showing a part of the 13,9 gb partitions. Is that even possible?
I restarted the computer and checked with the dir command all the partitions, the same sizes came out.
I checked the settings during startup and i got these:
Primary master - hd samsung
primary slave - hd maxtor
sec. master - none (this is correct)
sec. slave - CD-rom
Does this has something to do with it? It's weird though that this happened after formatting the c partition..
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Is the full drive size recognized in cmos? It sounds like there was a drive over-lay program installed.
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Hi again
A sumsung ???????
and a Maxtor ???????With the drive id you should be able to determine what the two drives are capable of.
There is the smallest posibility that one of the jumpers on the drives is not contacting properly (this is a assuming the samsung and the maxtor were running ok before you found the need to reformat them.)Be also aware that the MBR of a hard drive (part of the MBR is where the partition data is kept) can get corrupted with odd characters that will plauge fdisk and proper partitioning. (Just the fact that windows went nuts after you did a fdisk, reminds me of people who have had similar problems) Corruption can also be incured as a result of a virus. (resetting or switching off the computer while the disk is writting, is also blamed.) To fix that you might want to reconsider starting from scratch. at dos use
fdisk /mbr
the /mbr cleans up the first little important bit of a drive.
Do both harddrives. Then repartition etc...
I note your cd rom is sec slave. It should be Secondry master. Check the jumpers on the back of the cd rom and configure it for master. (I'd fix that straight away too - just in case.)
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Dave and anenefan,
thank you for your replies.Is the full drive size recognized in cmos? It sounds like there was a drive over-lay program installed.
-Yes both drives are recognized. Im not sure about the drive-overlay program, because its not my computer. Any way to obtain that proggie?anenefan,
i did the /mbr command before formatting the c drive.With the drive id you should be able to determine what the two drives are capable of.
There is the smallest posibility that one of the jumpers on the drives is not contacting properly (this is a assuming the samsung and the maxtor were running ok before you found the need to reformat them.)
-Both samsung and maxtor disks were running fine until the format.
I shall try to change the jumpers.
Any other thoughts?
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Hi again
Dave01 is on the money with checking the cmos. In the hard drive section you have an option to set the drive to user defined. It is probably best to select Auto. Without knowing the true size of the drives - its the safest option.
Yep hard drives and ide controlers can be funny creatures. That cd secondry slave with no master on the ide cable - best to be fixed so it is a master.
Ok an /mbr was done, so then another problem is the cause of the partition table not being saved correctly. Check the drives to make sure the samsung was master and the maxtor the slave. Both could be set in a cable select system. Then it's just a matter of which one you put where on the ide(special cs) cable and have the jumpers set for cs.
Yep drives will run with the wrong jumpers, I've done it myself by accident and wondered just how the system sorted it out. I have seen a drive that worked fine in a system (for a couple of years) only to be removed and found that cable select was what the system was using, as the jumpers had been put in from the wrong side. Also couple of drives that were hard to set as master as the master jumper pins were not working as they should, etc. etc.
Quite a really long long list. But anyhow the small glitches catch up with us now and again.
As a thought, format the hdds one at a time. When I'm lazy from time to time, I let 98 install however is easiest for it. /mbr it and let windos do the hard disk setup etc. Then fdisk it afterwards - if that works.
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As I recall, if hard drives are partitioned with multiple partitions with third party software rather than fdisk, information gets written to the MBR. If you do a fdisk/mbr that information gets erased.
I can't remember the details so I can't be sure if this is part of your problem.
Unless you need to keep the data on the partitions, you may want to go ahead and repartition any questionable drives with fdisk.
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I did a google search for:
fdisk/mbr "third party"
and got quite a few responses. These were the first two. They explain the problems with using fdisk/mbr with some third party partitioning software:
Of course this may not be related to your problem but when you mentioned you used fdisk/mbr and afterwards you had partition problems, I thought it was a possibility.
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Hi anenefan,
In the hard drive section you have an option to set the drive to user defined. It is probably best to select Auto. Without knowing the true size of the drives - its the safest option.
-Ok, I will try that.As I recall, if hard drives are partitioned with multiple partitions with third party software rather than fdisk, information gets written to the MBR. If you do a fdisk/mbr that information gets erased.
I can't remember the details so I can't be sure if this is part of your problem.
-Hmm..that makes kinda sense. Ok, I'll need to figure out how the harddisks were partitioned.
Dave, do you think that an third-party software can make the part of a partition "vicible" and i can re-partition them without any data loss?
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Sorry Dave,
I guess i was still typing my previous message and you were posting it :)
I think this actually could be the cause of the problem.
Is there a possible solution? (since my knowledge about partitioning is not very great)
Anyway, i thank you all in advanced for your patience and time.Lizette
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I doubt you can recover the partitions as they were previously. I suppose that since you formatted the partitions there's nothing on them you need to keep anyway. If that's the case, I'd just run fdisk to remove all the partitions on both drives and start over. Create one partition on each drive and then install 98 on c:
If you wanted two partitions on each drive you could use fdisk to create them (after removing the old partitions). That way you could specify the size of each partition to be the same as they were previously.
It just depends on how your uncle wants it set up.
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Hello LizetteI've posted you a message at hotmail.com
because here I can't send snapshots.be well
Stefan
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Hi Stefan,
I checked my email but I didnt receive anything from you. If you still have it in your outbox, could you send it again? :)
Thanks.
@Dave: yeah i was also thinking that, but i formatted only 3 out of 4 partitions because my uncle had some data he needed to keep. But somehow all partitions were formatted anyway. I'll discuss your thoughts with him. Thanks you all!
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Hi
Sorry too hear you were trying to save the data on one of the original partitions. Find a copy of pc inspector. (the free version is PCIFR3.exe and is about 2.9 kB - and very functional) Install it into another system that goes and place the drive, which had the data that was meant to be kept, as the slave drive. Run and scan the drive, which can take time. Hopefully most of the data will still be there (not unless you used format /u). Copy the data across to Hard disk in the going system. Some or most of the data is better than none.
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Hello Lizette
I resent the message at the same
addresse lizstique17@hotmail.com
If it's the right one, you suppose to
receive itbe well meanwhile :-)
Stefan
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