Missing 1/2 of a drive, pretty sure it's a missing partition.

VaMage

Member
Hi and thanks for reading this.

Last week I got a new PC, yay me, which meant my wife got my old PC, not so yay me as it really really needed an O.S. refresh. (Image wouldn't work too many hardware changes since I last took the time to deal with it.)

I was already here because I'm going to be dual booting XP & Win 7 for awhile and so, being not so bright and having too much free time, I decided to multi-boot the old rig.

Everything went fine until I read about GAG, which I at least hope is the culprit, and things have gotten a bit strange since then, so I'm really hoping that I didn't pull a boot virus from somewhere.

Here is how my problem goes. The PC has a Promise raid controller, with a pair of 125GB WD's, and an old 40GB Deskstar that I used to keep Win98 on, it also has a newer WD Blue SATA 250GB.

The 250GB was divided into two 125GB primary partitions. Currently only one of those is accessible as far as I can tell. XP Pro doesn't see it, Partiton Magic 7 doesn't see it, but Partition Disk Doctor does see and will rebuild it, but it just reverts once I reboot.

FDISK won't touch it, and Super Disk might, it at least shows me all the partitions, but I can't get it to let me select any of the menu options so all it's really doing is showing me that the partitions are there. (That is the mouse doesn't work in it, and the keyboard combo's don't do anything.)

XP Pro's Setup screen shows this:

Unknown Disk

(There is no disk in this drive.)
Unknown Disk

(There is no disk in this drive.)
131070 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi (MBR)
Unpartitioned space 131069 MB

228880 MB Disk 0 at Id 1 on bus 0 on Fasttrack (MBR)
Unpartitioned space 228879 MB

39261 MB Disk 0 at Id 1 on bus 0 on Fasttrack (MBR)
Unpartitioned space 39260 MB

There are 2 IDE drives in a RAID 0, with 1 drive also on the Promise card. I had stored Win98 on the single drive at C: and WinXP Pro on the Raid at D:,

When I added in the WD 2500KS, SATA, I just added it at G:, E: & F: were partitioned on the RAID just to make my life easier. This all worked 100% for years, until I decided to get creative, which is always a mistake. :}

Partition Disk Doctor, PDD, shows a map of 125GB that is all XP install will address, not including the RAID, then a 7MB sliver that says "Linux", though the machine has never had UNIX in any variant on it, then the other 125GB.

I used PDD to rebuild it, and then PMagic to merge it. Windows rebooted just fine, PMagic ran and showed a nice whole WD2500KS, then Windows finished booting, and I was back to the same situation.

Nothing I've tried seems to touch this problem. I removed GAG, tried FIXMBR, no go, tried FDISK off of a FreeDos not only no go but "Invalid drive designation".

I used a utility to zero out all four drives, and rebuilt the array on the drives I'm not having any problem with, just to be thorough.

I grabbed WD's diagnostic tool which shows a nice 250GB working perfectly, BIOS reports the drive correctly, and chkdsk finds no problems, on the 1/2 that it can see.

So, what's up with this? Any suggestions I might try, the WD drive is under 2 years old so if I get really PO'ed I can just RMA it, but I'd rather not. Besides I'm intrigued now and would really like to figure out how I screwed up, this time that is.

Thanks again,
Larry

P.S. Oh, and my wife wants to play WoW by this weekend so if I can't fix it by Friday night I'll have to go buy a 500GB from BestBuy, pull the whole mess out and drop a single new drive in so I can get her up and running by Saturday. Though I could just use the old disks but they are bound to go one day soon, at 8+ years of solid work without a hiccup I'm just asking for it, backups or no backups!

<and you thought productions deadlines were bad! All production down can do is lose me a job, my wife is a WHOLE lot more creative then that. SHEESH. :} >

Addendum:

I hate being an idiot, almost as much as I hate posting stupid questions, much less answering said stupid questions myself.

The answer is SP1. It just never occurred to me that it would have a boundry problem, until I realized that the Raid array, which is the same size as the newer WD 2500KS, was of course running out of the Promise drivers.

I just tried it with a slipstream'ed SP3 and the whole drive shows up no problem. Went back to my orginial XP Pro disk and it was right back to showing me 1/2 the drive.

Now I'm going to have to see if I can get the drive to show up after I update to SP3 post install, instead of using my slipstream'ed XP disk, because something in that disk blows up Novabackup and the front panel of my Sound Blaster Titanium after the install and all updates. Novastore is looking into what in SP3 could cause Novaback to fail, but who knows if they will have any better luck then I did. Novabackup works in good old vanilla but that seems to be where my problem with the drive is.

So, around and around she goes...
 
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Try Partition Table Doctor 3.5. i also had some problems like you and got it repaired with this beautiful tool. while formatting windows my friend deleted partitions and created new ones but did not format them. i was able to recover even those partiotions with all the data intact.
 
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Try Partition Table Doctor 3.5. i also had some problems like you and got it repaired with this beautiful tool. while formatting windows my friend deleted partitions and created new ones but did not format them. i was able to recover even those partiotions with all the data intact.


Thanks for the reply, I did use PTD 3.5 and you're right it's a great program.
 
Hi,

PMagic is not compatible with the new NT6 partitioning rules. You can get away with it if you install Vista/7 after using it.

I don't recommend using PMagic once you have Vista/7 installed.

Luckily - Paragon are giving away Partition Manager 9.5 Pro - only until 18th Oct.

This is a great app. - Works perfectly on my 7 x64.

32 bit installer also available.

It is a big download as the installer also includes a 60mb boot disc.

License software giveaway data recovery
 
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