i have a 10 gig hd with xp pro installed as master and a 60 gig hd 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 the 60 gig with win 2000 on it and it 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 can be a sofware issue though) and then it asked me to restart the computer for the changes to take effect.
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 have tried changing cables (ide controllers around) No difference.
The Bios has now decided to recognise the hard drive as being a 60 gig again but there is still no partitions or info to be found on my hard drive.
I tried running Nortons Disk Doctor on it but it said that the hard drive needed to be formatted.
Why isnt the partitions being recognised properly? How can all the data on my hard drive just dissapear with a reboot.
And why did the BIOS recognise the size of my Hard drive so strangly?
Could this be something to do with disk clash? The computer wasnt moved around atall.
Or could the install of the Microteck software corrputed the whole hard drive. 'Surely it could only have caused a problem with 2000 MBR at the very worst and not the loss of all the partitions.
Any ideas anyone
The HIGHLY TECHNICAL forum is not for troubleshooting.
Please post in the appropriate category.
AnandTech Moderator