250 gig drive showing up as 170 gigs after xp repair

[Microsoft]

I have 2 250 gigs maxtors. one primary and one slave. The slave is now
coming up as 170 gigs with no unallocated space. I suspected a corrupt boot
record. Here are the details

1) Repaired windowsxp pro
2) When windows came back up. The 250 slave that had 170 gig partition and
about 70 unallocated came up as "disk unreadable"
3) Read about diskprobe, but used utulity called active@ partition recovery
3.0. It saw the partition as deleted and allowed me to put it back. The
utility show 60 gigs unallocated
4) Boot back to XP and the partion and data are there, but not the
unallocated space. I don't have enough room to move my data off and blow
everything away. So any ideas how I can get my unallocated space back?

Partition magic sees the drive as 170 gigs also.


Thanks...

 

[jazz]

Try viewing the partition form dos or a partition manager from outside
windows xp. a 250 gig drive will have to use LBA mode were the actual CHS is
different and a little program translats to provide the increased space.
Also, it is possible that the recovery tool you used translated the LBA
wrong. Ther are 2 or 3 different techniques use with LBA adressing and this
problem isn't all th at uncommon (especialy if the drive was formated on a
different mainboard)

You may run into issue also if the ide chipset on the mainboard doesn't
fully support 48 bit adressing wich allows for the larger drive adress
space. The hardrive probably came with an installl disk that could do a
trick to allow full usage of the disk even though it wasn't supported. My
guess is that the partition recovery too you used might have had some
dificulty in reading this information and interpreting it properly resulting
in the boot sector being marked improperly and the diskspace is being
reported incorectly.

Unfortunatly i do not know of any 100% non destructive ways to repartition
or resize the partition or even recreating the partition tables. You may try
somethign like partition magic 8.0 (or above) to see if it can determin the
partition tables and resize them. Windopws xp in itself has in some cases
not been able to see partition as unallocated free space when i have turned
them off in the diskmanager snap in. A raw dos/windows 98 boot disk might
be able to see this but the version of fdisk that come with it might be
limited in what size partitions it can see. I would goto www.bootdisk.com
and get a windows 98 boot disk then goto http://www.23cc.com/free-fdisk/ and
download the free fdisk. extract the program and copy the program folder to
the boot disk you created. Then after starting the computer to the boot
disk, c d into the program dir and run fdisk from there. As alway it is a
good idea to have your data backed up before making any changes. Also once
you get you problem figured out, you mihgt want to back up the boot sector
of the drive. i forget the programs names that can do it but a google search
should give you somethign. If this ever happens again you could just restore
the partition and (hopefully) be done

 

[Mas G]

It almost kills me to say this.. but I installed SP2 and every issue I had
went away... go figure..

 

[jazz]

I'm glad to hear that. SP2 would act like a fresh install in some ways. I'm
going to asume it looked at the boot record and partition tables and rewrite
it but this is only a guess. There may also have been some issue with the
disk manager inside XP and SP2 fixed it. At least now you have a
funnctioning system that resembles what it should. Good luck,