awful hard drive trouble...help

[mesman00]

ok. i am having alot of trouble with my hard-drive. i am going about re-installing windows. so i pop in the windows 2000 cd. get to the screen where you handle the partitions. i delete the only partition i currenly have, so now i have 80 GB of unpartitioned space. i create a new partition thats about 8 GB in size. I select to install windows on that partition. Then, as usual, windows tries to format the partition. however, i get the error that says "windows was unable to format the partition." So i tried this process again with the same result. I took my harddrive out and put it in another computer as the slave hard-drive, loaded into windows, and tried to format the drive from there, but i get the same error. So, i boot up the gentoo live-cd, and go into fdisk. However, upon loading fdisk i get the following error:

"FATAL ERROR: Bad primary partition 2: Partition begins after end-of-disk."

Is there anything i can do to fix this. Please tell me there is. This hardrive is only a few months old (yet i think the warranty has expired) and i don't have the cash for a new one. Yikes, please help.

 

[Eagle]

Can you delete the partition again or is it stuck on there?

 

[mesman00]

Can you delete the partition again or is it stuck on there?

i can delete the partition again, and then my unpartitioned space just goes back to 80 GB. If i try to re-create the partition i get the same error. What is weird is that it makes the partition the D: drive ( instead of C: as it always has), even though there are no other partitions. this is what my partition tables looks like before creating the partition:

Unpartitioned Space - 80 GB

And after making the partition

Unpartitioned Space - 8 mb
D: Unformatted - 8 GB
Unpartitioned Space - 64 GB

I don't know why it breaks it down into to unpartitioned sectors. When everything was working fine there used to be only one unpartitioned sector. Also, i noticed that last few times i booted into windows a G: partition showed up out of no where, and everytime i tried to double click it i got the error "G:\ unrecognized parameter" or something of that sort. I have no clue what's going on, but i really hope i can fix it. more help please. thanks.

 

[mesman00]

Can you delete the partition again or is it stuck on there?

i can delete the partition again, and then my unpartitioned space just goes back to 80 GB. If i try to re-create the partition and format it i get the same error. What is weird is that it makes the partition the D: drive ( instead of C: as it always has), even though there are no other partitions. this is what my partition tables looks like before creating the partition:

Unpartitioned Space - 80 GB

And after making the partition

Unpartitioned Space - 8 mb
D: Unformatted - 8 GB
Unpartitioned Space - 64 GB

I don't know why it breaks it down into two unpartitioned sectors. When everything was working fine there used to be only one unpartitioned sector, and my partition table woud look something like this:

C: NTFS - 8 GB
Unpartitioned Space - 72 GB

also, i noticed that last few times i booted into windows a G: partition showed up out of no where, and everytime i tried to double click it i got the error "G:\ unrecognized parameter" or something of that sort. I have no clue what's going on, but i really hope i can fix it. more help please. thanks.

 

[Kaoss626]

you need to create the partition as a primary partition rather than a logical partition.

it looks as if you are creating a logical partition. C: is the first primary partition. Also because there is 8MB of unpartitioned space prior to the first partition.

 

[mesman00]

you need to create the partition as a primary partition rather than a logical partition.

it looks as if you are creating a logical partition. C: is the first primary partition. Also because there is 8MB of unpartitioned space prior to the first partition.

alright, well how would i go about doing this, seeing as i can't access fdisk. How do i create a primary partition as opposed to a logical partition in the windows 2000 setup? keep it coming...thanks.

 

[Kaoss626]

look for a program called ranish partition manager. (don't worry its a freeby relativly easy to find on the web. PRINT out the readme. Put it on a windows9x boot disk (I'm sure that won't be hard to find) and use RPM to manage fat, fat32, NTFS, EX2FT, BEOS and many other forms of partitions in a much more user friendly environment than f@#%disk.

 

[mesman00]

look for a program called ranish partition manager. (don't worry its a freeby relativly easy to find on the web. PRINT out the readme. Put it on a windows9x boot disk (I'm sure that won't be hard to find) and use RPM to manage fat, fat32, NTFS, EX2FT, BEOS and many other forms of partitions in a much more user friendly environment than f@#%disk.

you say put it on a windows9x boot disk. do you mean just copy the files to like a windows98 boot disk, boot up to a command prompt, the run the app from there?

 

[Kaoss626]

yep.

Read the readme file for RPM should fill in the blanks for you.

 

[Kaoss626]

grab a copy of RPM here

http://www.ranish.com/part/

 

[mesman00]

thanks Kaoss626, that program is great and everything is fine now. there was some partition on my harddrive that wasn't showing up in any other program, and once i deleted it everything was back to normal.

 

[Kaoss626]

Glad to hear it