Drive Geometry error

[Brent Beach]

Hi

I moved a hard drive from slave on an W98 ME machine to slave on a WXP
machine (DELL). XP appears to handle the drive.

Partition magic 7.0, running on the XP machine, says the old drive
configuration is 114470MB 14593C 255H 63S but appears to have been
created using a different drive geometry 240H 63S. It recommends
repartitioning the second drive.

Does this make sense?

Should I format and repartition this drive, switching from FAT32 to NTFS
in the process, possibly?

Brent

 

[Linda B]

It probably just depends on how well the drive is functioning, how much data
is on the drive, and how much time you want to spend working on it. If it
is functional (which it sounds like it is) and you have a bunch of stuff on
it which might be a pain to back up, I say leave it alone. Partition magic
says repartition because it sees a minor discrepancy, but it's not going to
hurt anything to leave it the way it is. Alternatively, if it's easy to
back up and/or there's not a lot of stuff on it, there's no harm in wiping
it out and reformatting.

If you're running it on an XP machine -- so the Master is NTFS -- and you're
going to reformat anyway, definitely reformat the old drive to NTFS. But
again, NTFS can see a FAT32 partition, so leaving it the way it is isn't
going to hurt anything (other than it being a less efficient and secure
format, but whatever).

How's *that* for noncommital?

--LB

 

[I'm Dan]

I moved a hard drive from slave on an W98 ME machine to slave on a WXP
machine (DELL). XP appears to handle the drive.

Partition magic 7.0, running on the XP machine, says the old drive
configuration is 114470MB 14593C 255H 63S but appears to have been
created using a different drive geometry 240H 63S. It recommends
repartitioning the second drive.

Does this make sense?

Should I format and repartition this drive, switching from FAT32 to NTFS
in the process, possibly?

Yes, it's possible. Drives made in the last 10 yrs or so no longer report
their true CHS figures--has to do with drive geometry translation--so
different figures can be used as long as the net total sectors calculates
out to the same. That means your drive could work either as
CHS=14593/255/63, or as CHS=15505/240/63. It just depends on how the
computer's bios autodetected the drive, and increasingly with modern
machines the user doesn't have any control over that. For example, when
tinkering with a new HD recently, I noticed my IBM Thinkpad autodetected the
HD as having 240 cyls, but my Dell laptop saw the exact same HD as having
255 cyls.

Okay, but is that a problem? If you had more than one partition--after all,
a single 120GB FAT32 partition would be rather inefficient--you might
confuse the system because partitions (which start on cylinder boundaries)
may have been setup in one place on the original machine and appear in
another place on the second machine. If the HD was only one giant primary
partition, partition-1 starts at the same place regardless of which CHS
figures you use, so XP may well be okay with it.

Either way, I wouldn't trust my data on such a drive. I'd consider it an
accident waiting to happen, and someday XP or some utility will decide to
"fix" things for you and totally screw it up. To use that HD reliably, I
would repartition/reformat the way the XP machine wants to see it. Besides,
you'll probably want to convert to NTFS anyway (more efficient for large
volumes and generally regarded as a more stable file system), and I'd be
nervous trying to directly convert that FAT32 to NTFS. So do it right--get
your data off, recreate partition(s), fresh format NTFS, and put your data
back. Then you can breathe easier in the long run.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Partition magic 7.0, running on the XP machine, says the old drive
configuration is 114470MB 14593C 255H 63S but appears to have been
created using a different drive geometry 240H 63S. It recommends
repartitioning the second drive.

Does this make sense?

Should I format and repartition this drive, switching from FAT32 to NTFS
in the process, possibly?

Yes. It has evidently been set up using a different specific geometry
rather than the standard LBA. First make a check in BIOS setup that
that sees it as LBA mode, and see if that is enough to correct the
matter if not. Then Delete the present partition, and reboot before
making a new one. At that sort of size NTFS would be appropriate, but I
would make the partition in XP rather than PM 7 which is not quite up to
date. Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk
Management and look lower right for the graphic of the drive. R-click
the partition if it shows, Delete partition, reboot R-click Unallocated
space, Create Partition

 

[Brent Beach]

Should I format and repartition this drive, switching from FAT32 to NTFS
in the process, possibly?

I would like to thank "I'm Dan" and Alex Nichol for their advice.

Backed up, deleted the partitions, rebooted, created two new partitions
(which the utility a little scarily calls creating a new logical disk
rather than creating a partition, although at other times it refers to
them as partitions) and am now restoring.

I never though a LAN was slow until I started moving 80GB across it.

The advice certainly increased by comfort with the process. Looks like
it is time to dump my old copy of Partition Magic now that I only have
NTFS file systems on XP.

Brent

 

[Alex Nichol]

Backed up, deleted the partitions, rebooted, created two new partitions
(which the utility a little scarily calls creating a new logical disk
rather than creating a partition, although at other times it refers to
them as partitions) and am now restoring.

It doesn't matter, but evidently the old partitions were inside an
'Extended partition' that has got left around. But provided you do not
want to boot to them, it really makes no difference.

Glad to hear it is going well. 80 GB is a *lot* whatever way you look
at it