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"Delete all partitions..."


gawguy

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I love to run these big questions by our techy braintrust. These guys are good! How does this sound for a total blowout...

 

I bought a nice used 60gb hard drive, laptop size, in a nice hard drive enclosure with USB connector. Hitachi Travelstar, nothing dodgy. Fellow said he hardly used it. Worked just fine in the enclosure.

 

For my own reasons I like to run Win2000 and I have a CD to install it. I want Win2000 on this drive, so I put it in a laptop, inserted Windows CD, and then things went to hell.

 

The install crashed on one laptop. I put it into a newer laptop and it went through the whole process and booted into Win2k. I installed Partition Magic and started the process of creating a new partion. It needed to reboot to do it. Got the blue dump screen, "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE." I put it back in its enclosure, connected it via USB and booted the computer from its original drive. I started Partition Magic, which basically cursed out the 60gb drive in the enclosure, wrote "BAD" on it and said, "Disk 2 appears to have partions created with a different drive geometry. This is a serious problem. No partition manipulations should be made using this product or the Operating System products. Delete all partitions, create knew ones under a new drive geometry." And f... off!

Don't use this product or any OS products! Don't use Partion Magic or DOS? Doesn't everything like this run under DOS? What would I use?

 

AND/OR...

How do you delete all partitions? I can't beleive there is anything physically wrong with this drive since I used it to transfer many gb's of data.

What is going on and what do I do?

 

Thanks for the help,

GG

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If you want to check the dsik for problems download Hitachis Drive Fitness Test, create the bootable floppy and run from it. Should recognize the disk even if it is an external USB drive. Advanced test takes long and is not necessary in this case. If you have time then do it. As you have to repartition the drive anyway you may go to utilities - erase MBR.

 

Partition magic allows to create a bootable floppy (two to be exact). Hope you can boot from floppy.

Then create the partitions on your computer as wanted.

 

 

Reasons that may have lead to the problems:

When a drive was connected to one controller and then is connected to another controler this may cause problems with the partition table. Best to wipe the MBR and partition from scratch.

Especially recommended when taking a drive from a computer and putting it in an external enclosure, or vice versa. When putting the drive from one computer into another computer this problem doesn't occur that often.

When you put the drive into the laptop, did you check that the drive geometry was detected automatically? This can be set in BIOS. When BIOS settings of drive setup are still set to the old drive then it's no wonder that Windows setup crashed. When you put a new drive into any computer than you'll have to check the BIOS settings.

 

 

As things are now I recommend you put the drive into the laptop / external case where you want to use it, check BIOS settings if it's in a laptop, run Drive Fitness Test and erase MBR (may run Quick Test and Advanced Test for peace of mind), run Partition Magic from floppy, create partitions as wanted and you are ready to go.

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zombie,

 

I never used a mac so I might be wrong. Are these the machines where you can't change the hardware anyway because a) you can't fucking open the thing and B) parts are not standard and c) the few available parts that will dry your wallet?

Also heared instead of BIOS the Macs use something that's much better. Can you tell a little about it?

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zombie,

 

I never used a mac so I might be wrong. Are these the machines where you can't change the hardware anyway because a) you can't fucking open the thing and B) parts are not standard and c) the few available parts that will dry your wallet?

Also heared instead of BIOS the Macs use something that's much better. Can you tell a little about it?

 

 

I think that those days are history mate. Mac nowadays use Intel processors, IDE drives, standard memory and so on. The real value added by the mac compared to PC is the OS: MACOSX...

 

Still I would never switch my PC for a mac.

 

 

Joeed

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