doesnt anybody know? 790.39 gig?

[Friendly]

Basic rundown.
My 60gig hard drive is being recognised in bios as 25 gig and in disk management it is recognised as a 790.39 gig

I am using an old pentium 3 with a 500cpu

10 gig with xp pro installed as master and a 60 gig as secondary with win 2000 pro installed on it.
The 10 gig has 1 partition and the 60 gig had about 6 partitions on it.
I changed the master drive to the 60 gig
win 2000 booted up 1st time around although very slowly.

As I had a scanner installed in xp, (Microtek 3800) when I booted to win 2000 it asked me to install the hardware, software which I did. ( I dont believe that its a sofware issue though)

When I went to restart, the bios would only recognise the 60 gig as a 25 gig and wouldn?t boot past, Verifying DMI Pool data
I went in to setup and tried to get the bios to recognise the 60 gig but it would only recognise it as a 25 gig.

I changed the hard drives back around to the 10 gig with xp O/S on it and it boots up fine but will only recognise the 60 gig slave as a 25 gig and it will now only show one partition on the 60 gig where as before it had about 6 partitions on it.
When I clicked on the drive, it said that the drive wasn?t formatted and would I like to format it.

When I went in to disk management it showed the 60 gig slave hard drive as being only one partition and it said although it is healthy it is in need of a format and that it is a 790.39 gigabyte.

It is formatted and it has heaps of partitons on it.
I was reading a book on data recovery and could probably recover the data off it but should I have too?
Why isnt it being recognised properly? The 60 gig isnt very old!
Any ideas anyone?




:|

 

[Mingon]

Damaged MBR or FAT at a guess. Have you tried ruuning fdisk?

 

[Friendly]

im confused with your answer, If it is a damaged MBR then the operating system wouldnt boot up. But that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is the Bios wont recognise the size of the hard drive and disk managment shows no partitions where there should be heaps.
I am leaning towards something like disk clash but that shouldnt have happened as the harddrives havent been moved atall.
Also what would running Fdisk do?

 

[EeyoreX]

im confused with your answer, If it is a damaged MBR then the operating system wouldnt boot up. But that has nothing to do with the problem. The problem is the Bios wont recognise the size of the hard drive and disk managment shows no partitions where there should be heaps.

A damaged MBR or damaged partition tables can very well be the problem, and may not always prevernt bootup.

I am leaning towards something like disk clash but that shouldnt have happened as the harddrives havent been moved atall.

What is "disk clash"?

Also what would running Fdisk do?

It would delete or recreate partitions. It is a destructive process. I would not do this if you intend to try and get your data back.

Download the diagnostic tools from Western Digital and check the drive. Or use the floppy that came with it, if it's a retail drive. Also, it doesn't mean crap if it's a new drive or not that old. Not that old and new drives can have problems too. In fact, if you are going to have a problem with a hard drive, it is most likely to be during the first 6 months to a year (barring mistreatment).

\Dan

 

[MangoTBG]

You should be happy your 60GB hdd is really an 800 Gigger!


::Jealous::

 

[Friendly]

sorry perhaps Iwasnt very clear with my last message.
Of course the OS may still boot up with a damaged MBR.

What I was trying to say is there is no MBR. It has gone. So how can can the problem be a damaged MBR?.
There is none. Nada! It has gone along with all the partitons.
Do you understand now why the problem isnt a damaged MBR.


As I said before, I put the hard drive on as a slave on the same controller as the master and used xp, disk management (on the master drive obviously) to look at what was on the 60 gig slave drive.
It showed that the drive was a healthy 60 gig with no partitions and also it is shown as being not formatted.
So why run Fdisk? What more can it show or do that xp's disk management hasnt already done?.

These were the points that I was trying to make.

Disk clash is where the spinning platters clash together! If I have that right.
Im only a learner so you will have to forgive me if I get some of the terminology wrong..

 

[Friendly]

sorry perhaps Iwasnt very clear with my last message.
Of course the OS may still boot up with a damaged MBR.

What I was trying to say is there is no MBR. It has gone. So how can can the problem be a damaged MBR?.
There is none. Nada! It has gone along with all the partitons.
Do you understand now why the problem isnt a damaged MBR.


As I said before, I put the hard drive on as a slave on the same controller as the master and used xp, disk management (on the master drive obviously) to look at what was on the 60 gig slave drive.
It showed that the drive was a healthy 60 gig with no partitions and also it is shown as being not formatted.
So why run Fdisk? What more can it show or do that xp's disk management hasnt already done?.

These were the points that I was trying to make.

Disk clash is where the spinning platters clash together! If I have that right.
Im only a learner so you will have to forgive me if I get some of the terminology wrong..

 

[Mingon]

Oops I meant chkdisk not fdisk I said mbr because I had a similar problem with a 8mb drive which suddenly appeared.

 

[jjyiz28]

when you want to dual boot, you install the older OS first. in your case, install 2000pro on 1 partition, then xp on another. most likely getting funny results when you mixed it up.

 

[EeyoreX]

when you want to dual boot, you install the older OS first. in your case, install 2000pro on 1 partition, then xp on another. most likely getting funny results when you mixed it up

Normally, this is true. With Windows XP and 2000 it really isn't. They are essentially the same OS, XP is basically 2000 nice and patched with a few additional features.

What I was trying to say is there is no MBR. It has gone. So how can can the problem be a damaged MBR?.
There is none. Nada! It has gone along with all the partitons.
Do you understand now why the problem isnt a damaged MBR.

AFAIK, the MBR can't just be "gone". The information is still on the drive, but the information that tells the hardware how to retrieve and sort the data it is damaged, and that is why you can't see your partitions, the MBR and/or partition table is damged, not just "gone". The only way the MBR would be gone is if the platters took a walk.

When a hard drive "clashes" it is not the platters crashing, it is usually the drive head that scrapes the platters, usually damaging them badly. Crash is probably a better, more widely used term If you hear clicking or scraping noises, you problably have experienced the "click of death" or are experiencing it. If the data and partitions are just not found, but the hardware seems to be working (no strange sounds), you should try some data recovery software. Many offer free trials or will at least let you scan to see how much, if any, data you can get back after you buy the software.

\Dan

 

[McMadman]

Originally posted by: EeyoreX

when you want to dual boot, you install the older OS first. in your case, install 2000pro on 1 partition, then xp on another. most likely getting funny results when you mixed it up

Normally, this is true. With Windows XP and 2000 it really isn't. They are essentially the same OS, XP is basically 2000 nice and patched with a few additional features

There were a few modifications to the basic loading files with 2k/xp (I believe NTLDR/NTDETECT.COM) which makes it so if you install 2k after xp, you'd be unable to load xp until replacing those files with the newer version. However this is starting to go off on another subject.


Now as to the bios issue, has the drive always detected as it's proper size? Did you use any overlay software to setup the drive initially?

 

[Friendly]

As I said before guys it wasnt a dual boot situation. It was two seperate hard drives each with there own O/S on them.
I was swapping them around.
Problem was when I swapped them around all of the data vanished off one of them.

I realise that in all reality all of the info stays on a hard drive and even after formatting if you know what you are doing
you can usually retreive the info . But the fact that I couldnt see anything on the hard drive at all had me wondering.

Can any body tell me could a Bad or Corrput MBR cause all the data including the partitions to become invisible?
I would guess not but would love to know if it is possible.

I found out what the cause was in the end by running Seagates diagnostic floppys.
My hard drive had deceased. Does any body want to buy a cheap paperweight?

Thanks for all your advice and help every body.

 

[McMadman]

It would have to be a pretty big screwup to cause that type of problem, the partition table (which should define the size) should rarely even be refrenced, I have seen drives take pretty bad damage, but none of them were ntfs (incase for some reason that made a difference)

One was an ide cable issue (it seemed) which lead to some data outright being lost (luckily it was a fat32 partition that win98 could access and retrieve some data)
It had some bad data in the boot record (no idea if this info will paste properly)
2. OEM Name:
SI4.1

(should read MSWIN4.1)

26. Volume Name: O N
M
27. File System Type: F
T32

26 should read NO NAME and 27 is obviously FAT32

I suppose you could have had some damage like this on another critical part of the drive (i'm assuming you were using ntfs which might damage easier under cases like that)

Another was caused by a bad Y splitter that would knock out the power to the drive if the case got moved which corrupted the fat beyond all hope of repair.

 

[Friendly]

it was win 2k but I did have it formatted as fat 32.
so if I understand what you are saying it is very unlikely that a damaged mbr would cause the partions to dissapear?

 

[McMadman]

I've never seen that type of error before, changing the os really shouldn't result in such damage. Have you tried looking at the drive with something simple like an old win98 boot disk?

 

[Friendly]

I ran it as a secondary drive and looked at it under disk management from within xp.
I ran chkdisk, I also used Nortons disk doctor. They all came up with the same errors. either not formatted or no file system.
Every thing has just gone. I ran Seagates diagnostic floppys which said return your hard drive for a refund.
So the reason why every thing dissapeard is that the hard drive up and died.
Why or how I dont know. One minute it worked fine the next it was dead.
The point that I have been trying to find out about is that every one kept saying that I should check to see that it is not a problem with the master boot record,.
And what I have been saying if I am right is, what is the point of trying to check to see if its a problem with the boot record as I cant even find it.
If there is no sign of the MBR at all or the partitons then surely it must be some thing much more serious than a master boot record problem?
Yes? No?

 

[McMadman]

That is an odd way for a drive to die overall, normally there's sounds or no drive detection at all.

The only times I've seen a majorly wrong size was on a drive that had overlay software on it, and they had changed the bios settings to something other than what was expected.

 

[Friendly]

yeah tell me about it. Under xp it is still detected as a healthy unformatted drive.
I reformatted it and repartitioned it. All looks fine but seagates software has detected all bad sectors.
It is as quiet as a mouse. I am almost tempted to try to install an o/s to see what happens.
but even if it did install which I doubt I wouldnt risk using it again.
for a while the bios was only detecting it as a 25 gig. Its a 60. And xp was detecting it as a 790 gig.
Weird isnt it?
Now it all looks fine and is detected ok.
Only thing I really notice about it is it runs very very warm.
Its still for sale. Would make a really good paperweight.

 

[McMadman]

I originally asked this before, but does your bios still idenfiy the size of the drive wrong?

it dosen't really make sense for the drive to up and die like this, but since the seagate software has given an error code, is your drive still under warranty?

Of course if you had anything on that drive that you care about, you may want to look into some software data recovery.

 

[Friendly]

yes the bios detects it fine but for a while it did detect it as a 25 gig
Kept playing around with the settings in the bios and rebooting it and it eventually came right.
Dont think it is a bios issue though because my other hard drive was never detected wrongly in the same computer
No need for data recovery as I was a clever little dicky and made sure every thing was backed up.
Its still under warranty but I cant remember which shop I bought it at. Clever ah!
Im going in Monday to ask the main seagate supplier here if he can do anything,
Thanks for your advice mate. Been much appreciated.
Friendly