Extreemly strange behaviour by 180Gb

[SDR]

I have Win XP on 20Gb drive. Introduced a 180Gb as slave and all is
fine, partitioned, formated etc. There was a strange partitin of only
8Mb which I could not understand and cannot see now.

I then removed the 20Gb drive, made the 180Gb the master (changed
jumper on the drive) and on boot the machine hangs. Tried to boot from
a floppy but it will not boot - mention of 8Mb drive which puzzles me.

Swaped the drive to slave and introduced the 20Mb as master and all is
well.

Want to use the 180Gb only but cannot find a way to solve this.

BTW on boot, the bios recognises the drive.

 

[Frank Jelenko]

Have you installed Win XP on the 180GB drive or imaged the 20GB system drive
onto the 180GB?

Don't worry about the 8mb partition on the hard drive. I don't know what
it's for, but it's shows on all my drives.

 

[HamMan]

I have Win XP on 20Gb drive. Introduced a 180Gb as slave and all is
fine, partitioned, formated etc. There was a strange partitin of only
8Mb which I could not understand and cannot see now.

I then removed the 20Gb drive, made the 180Gb the master (changed
jumper on the drive) and on boot the machine hangs. Tried to boot from
a floppy but it will not boot - mention of 8Mb drive which puzzles me.

Swaped the drive to slave and introduced the 20Mb as master and all is
well.

Want to use the 180Gb only but cannot find a way to solve this.

BTW on boot, the bios recognises the drive.

Is the motherboard an OEM brand (eg Compaq) some of these use soft BIOSes
which are stored in the MBR or a small partition on the the hard disk. This
is unlikely though.

This happens on my dual P1 server, it can read and access an 80Gb disk, but
refuses to boot from it. You will need ot find a BIOS update to fix this, or
install windows on the 20Gb disk (which is below the 36Gb Limit)

Hamman

 

[philo]

I have Win XP on 20Gb drive. Introduced a 180Gb as slave and all is
fine, partitioned, formated etc. There was a strange partitin of only
8Mb which I could not understand and cannot see now.

I then removed the 20Gb drive, made the 180Gb the master (changed
jumper on the drive) and on boot the machine hangs. Tried to boot from
a floppy but it will not boot - mention of 8Mb drive which puzzles me.

Swaped the drive to slave and introduced the 20Mb as master and all is
well.

Want to use the 180Gb only but cannot find a way to solve this.

BTW on boot, the bios recognises the drive.

Unless you have installed an OS on the drive
it cannot possibly boot...

or are you saying that the machine just locks up?
if so you might actually have to remove the harddrive jumper (i;ve seen that
a few times)

as far as that 8 megs...it's nothing to worry about.

according to a book written by R.W. Smith... the 8 megs of freespace is
just an "artifact"

of the CHS method of partition identification.

artifacts of the CHS method of identifying partitions

 

[Guess Who]

This is normal for a secondary disk that had a PRIMARY partition created on
it. Yje OS assumes that since you made a PRIMARY partition, you would want
to boot off that drive. The 8MB hidden partition is actually what would be
used as the boot partition. You won't see this partition by regular means,
but it IS visible when you run the WinXP install. It also may rearrange the
drive letters if you try to reinstall.

What you should have done was set up the secondary drive as one full
EXTENDED partition, and then create a logical drive for each partition you
wanted on the second drive. Also, I find it better to create only 1 primary
partition on the main drive which I will install Windows to, and create an
extended partition for the remainder of the drive with logivcal drive
letters.

I have 9 partitions on 2 160GB disks, and my drive letters always remain
constant.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have Win XP on 20Gb drive. Introduced a 180Gb as slave and all is
fine, partitioned, formated etc. There was a strange partitin of only
8Mb which I could not understand and cannot see now.

I then removed the 20Gb drive, made the 180Gb the master (changed
jumper on the drive) and on boot the machine hangs. Tried to boot from
a floppy but it will not boot - mention of 8Mb drive which puzzles me.

The very first sector of any disk is used for its master boot record,
including the partition table saying how the disk is laid out.
Partitions are always aligned on 'logical cylinder' boundaries, so the
rest of this first cylinder is left unused - that is your 8MB. The
partitioning software you used *may* have made a buffer, non-aligned
partition in it

When you then try to boot the disk thee are two points:

First there needs to be 'MBR Code' in that sector for the BIOS to pass
the buck to. It *sounds* as if you have it, but the point needs
checking; second it will then try to boot the partition marked as
active, or if none is, the first in the partition table. I think that
is where your trouble lies.

Two tools can fix it - easier, if you have a Win98 startup floppy is to
use that; boot it; run
FDISK /MBR
then just
FDISK
in which use 'Set Active partition' to choose the one with XP.

Or
Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk. Boot the XP CD and, instead
of Setup, take the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password
requested is blank, and TAB over. Use

FixMbr
then
Diskpart
and its subcommands
List Partition
to find the one, n, with XP - probably 2 but make sure
Select partition n
to match
Active
Exit

 

[Conor]

I have Win XP on 20Gb drive. Introduced a 180Gb as slave and all is
fine, partitioned, formated etc. There was a strange partitin of only
8Mb which I could not understand and cannot see now.

I then removed the 20Gb drive, made the 180Gb the master (changed
jumper on the drive) and on boot the machine hangs. Tried to boot from
a floppy but it will not boot - mention of 8Mb drive which puzzles me.

Swaped the drive to slave and introduced the 20Mb as master and all is
well.

Want to use the 180Gb only but cannot find a way to solve this.

This 8MB partition is placed there by Windows to store partition
information etc. It is supposed to be there and you cannot delete it
even with tools such as Partition Magic. Nothing is wrong.


--
Conor

"The vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world.
And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."
- George Bush

 

[David]

I don't have an NTFS boot drive so I'm going on a limb..
run FDISK (boot floppy?) and set the primary partition to ACTIVE. When MS
partitions a 2nd hd its primary partion will not be set as a bootable 80hex
target.