KameTama
01-19-2003, 10:31 AM
I somehow totally screwed up my harddisk partitioning, but likely just not enough that I have lost my data.
I have 3 harddisks installed, and 2 of them are acting up.
I have no idea what exactly is wrong since every single program I have used is saying something else.
Mandrake diskdrake says everything is just fine and that is the same program I have used to make the partitions on the 3rd drive. Ofcourse, the drive letters are wrong, but since it says that its just a guess and I have multiple drives I thought nothing wrong of it.
But back in windows, things get messy. I suddenly have an extra drive and the order of the drive letters is different from the actual partitioning. The extra drive acts like something unformatted and asks to be formatted every time I empty my Trash Bin (now that's strange). But since it's not interfering with any normal action on my computer I left it alone because I have no idea how to repair it and it isn't showing up in any partitioning program.
Everything worked just fine until I ran a disk check recently saying that there is a lot of mess on the partitions of my 3rd drive. Not only was it telling the free space falsely, there also were a whopping lot of unallocated file clusters, roughly accounting for all of my free space on all of my 3rd drive partitions seperately, going up to a whopping 18 GB on the largest partition!
I deleted it to free up the space hoping to resolve some problems.
But the story doesn't end there. Now scandisk is acting up, always saying there isn't enough free memory to scan any drive. But when I go into windows safe mode, it says none of the 3rd drive partitions are there.
And on top of that, when I try to copy files over the network from the largest partition of the 3rd drive it stops after a while saying it cant read from that drive. During the copying process, my hard disk makes normal noises but in a very consistent rythm, getting louder until I get the error, but not unusually loud for normal disk usage.
When I look at the partitions of the 3rd disk in a windows based partitioner called partition manager I believe, it says there is a normal and one faulty partition equal the size of the free space on that disk which shouldn't be there, totally different from how diskdrake and the windows file system says it is.
Also, when I try to go to dos mode out of windows, my computer hangs giving two beeps, but when I start dos mode from boot, it just ignores the 3rd drive, making me unable to run scandisk. And like I said in windows safe mode, it also ignores the 3rd drive.
In other words, I can't use scandisk on my 3rd drive, unless I somehow start a clean windows that can see the 3rd drive.
It also can't be a virus because I did a total scan with panda checking out OK.
Since I have such a complex problem, I have no idea where to start. I think I could mount the 3rd disk partitions in linux so it checks them on startup, but I don't want to lose my data which I can still almost normally access in windows.
This should be the wierdest problem I have ever encountered in my computing life, and I certainly don't know enough about hard drives to solve this problem.
Maybe it all started because of a faulty hardware setting of the 3rd drive, maybe it is because of a bad sector or other file system problem. Maybe it just is because diskdrake did a faulty partition.
This should be a real challenge to solve without data loss, but maybe you can help me out on the best solution.
Many grateful thanks beforehand.
PS : Maybe this isn't exactly a linux newbie problem, but since I think linux (diskdrake) may be the cause or the solution (using a mounted check) of the problem, I hope you can help.
I have 3 harddisks installed, and 2 of them are acting up.
I have no idea what exactly is wrong since every single program I have used is saying something else.
Mandrake diskdrake says everything is just fine and that is the same program I have used to make the partitions on the 3rd drive. Ofcourse, the drive letters are wrong, but since it says that its just a guess and I have multiple drives I thought nothing wrong of it.
But back in windows, things get messy. I suddenly have an extra drive and the order of the drive letters is different from the actual partitioning. The extra drive acts like something unformatted and asks to be formatted every time I empty my Trash Bin (now that's strange). But since it's not interfering with any normal action on my computer I left it alone because I have no idea how to repair it and it isn't showing up in any partitioning program.
Everything worked just fine until I ran a disk check recently saying that there is a lot of mess on the partitions of my 3rd drive. Not only was it telling the free space falsely, there also were a whopping lot of unallocated file clusters, roughly accounting for all of my free space on all of my 3rd drive partitions seperately, going up to a whopping 18 GB on the largest partition!
I deleted it to free up the space hoping to resolve some problems.
But the story doesn't end there. Now scandisk is acting up, always saying there isn't enough free memory to scan any drive. But when I go into windows safe mode, it says none of the 3rd drive partitions are there.
And on top of that, when I try to copy files over the network from the largest partition of the 3rd drive it stops after a while saying it cant read from that drive. During the copying process, my hard disk makes normal noises but in a very consistent rythm, getting louder until I get the error, but not unusually loud for normal disk usage.
When I look at the partitions of the 3rd disk in a windows based partitioner called partition manager I believe, it says there is a normal and one faulty partition equal the size of the free space on that disk which shouldn't be there, totally different from how diskdrake and the windows file system says it is.
Also, when I try to go to dos mode out of windows, my computer hangs giving two beeps, but when I start dos mode from boot, it just ignores the 3rd drive, making me unable to run scandisk. And like I said in windows safe mode, it also ignores the 3rd drive.
In other words, I can't use scandisk on my 3rd drive, unless I somehow start a clean windows that can see the 3rd drive.
It also can't be a virus because I did a total scan with panda checking out OK.
Since I have such a complex problem, I have no idea where to start. I think I could mount the 3rd disk partitions in linux so it checks them on startup, but I don't want to lose my data which I can still almost normally access in windows.
This should be the wierdest problem I have ever encountered in my computing life, and I certainly don't know enough about hard drives to solve this problem.
Maybe it all started because of a faulty hardware setting of the 3rd drive, maybe it is because of a bad sector or other file system problem. Maybe it just is because diskdrake did a faulty partition.
This should be a real challenge to solve without data loss, but maybe you can help me out on the best solution.
Many grateful thanks beforehand.
PS : Maybe this isn't exactly a linux newbie problem, but since I think linux (diskdrake) may be the cause or the solution (using a mounted check) of the problem, I hope you can help.