Woo Hoo!... Another Hide Drive problem .. Please Help

[Ben S.]

factory 60gb drive was partitioned as C:/D:. Bought an
additional 120gb drive, and setup as slave. everything
worked fine until I began a fresh OS install. As I began
the reinstall, the system said that the D: wasn't
accessible, and it only formatted the C: drive, which is
only 1/3 of original factory capacity. did the reinstall
twice and am now left with only the C: partiion
(20gb/60gb). My second (120gb) drive functions fine, but
absolutely no idea what happened to that D: drive of 40gb.
thanks so much for your thoughts.

Ben

 

[WinXP Blues]

Hi,

Here's one way to recover your 40G. Connect the 60G HD as
master. Go into BIOS and set it to boot with floppy first,
then CDROM. Put in Win98 or WinME boot disk (floppy). Once
RAM Drive has been install, use Fdisk to delete all
partitions on the HD. Restart the computer, format the HD
and you should have recovered all of your 60G minus ~7%
(Per Cassandra, AKA Amethyst). Good luck

Sleepless

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Ben.

What do you see in Disk Management? (From the Run prompt, type:
diskmgmt.msc)

You should see HDD0 (your 60 GB drive) divided into two volumes. Your new
HDD1 (120 GB) will be one or more volumes, depending on how you partitioned
it. You didn't tell us what "drive" letter is assigned to your new drive.

The BIOS and WinXP each have their own rules for assigning "drive" letters
to HD volumes when you boot. The BIOS has no memory; it assigns letters
from scratch each time it boots. IF you specifically tell WinXP which
"drive" letter to assign to which volume, it should remember. If you don't,
though, then it probably will reassign letters - according to its own
algorithm - each time you boot. We call them "drive" letters, but they
actually are not assigned to physical drives, but to each "volume" - that
is, each primary partition and each logical drive in an extended partition.
Each volume can be separately formatted and treated much like a separate
physical drive.

In Disk Management, you should be able to see which drive letter is now
assigned to the second volume on HDD0, which USED TO BE Drive D:. It may
now be E:, or some other letter, depending on how many CD/DVD drives,
network drives, etc., you have and which letters are assigned to them.
Also, the OEM who originally organized your HD may have made some unorthodox
assignments, hidden partitions, etc.

Using Disk Management, you can reassign drive letters to suit yourself -
except for the System and Boot volumes, which probably are both C:, in your
case.

RC

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Ben.

To repeat my first question:

Have you ever run Disk Management? (I'm often amazed that even now, over 3
years after it first appeared in Win2K, even many power users haven't found
it! And it's such a useful program! It does all that we used to need
MS-DOS and FDISK and Format.exe to do, plus drive letter assignments that we
did with Device Manager in Win9x/ME.) What tools did you use to partition
and format your new 120 GB HD?

The Graphics View of Disk Management should show you exactly what WinXP
THINKS is on the first HD, including what follows your Drive C: on that HD.
It will show whether your old D: was a primary partition or a logical drive
in the extended partition. I like to click View in Disk Management and set
it to Volume List on top and Graphical View on the bottom.

The Help file from Disk Management has a lot of good information about hard
disks and file systems. Much more and better than in previous versions of
Help.

RC

 

[Benjamin Soans]

If deleting all the partitions, it would be better to download a utility
from the hard disk manufacturers site which can reset the hard disk in about
half a minute. Thats what I do to my Samsung drive if it gets messed up
(shows a lesser size than it should)after too much experimentation. (Its
called clear hardisk or something similar)

Benjy