Hi Folks,
I got my hands on a secondhand PC for my son to deter him from crashing my own one!! The problem I have is that the hard disk is 10 gig but when the system is running it only indicates that it is a 2 gig. I recon that the drive was partitioned at some stage. A mate of mine recons that if you "fdisk" the system you can restore it to the origional size. Has anyone any ideas?
Regards,
Horse
If the partitions haven't been formatted then you won't see them in Expllorer as far as I remember. Or maybe it's if the partition hasn't been created and it is just totally empty space.
FDISK can be your friend here, but it can also be your foe. If you run FDISK you get a few options. Some of them are very dangerous (in your situation), but if you stick to the options about displaying partition details you can't go too far wrong.
Possibly when you run FDISK you will see that there is a partition of 2g and free space of 8g. In this situation you can create a new partition in the empty space.
If it gets any more complicated you may be better off with some of the commercial partitioning tools (try google for partition tool) as these can give you more user-friendly information about what is or might be in the spare space.
If the partitions haven't been formatted then you won't see them in Expllorer as far as I remember. Or maybe it's if the partition hasn't been created and it is just totally empty space.
You're the hardware person zag so you're probably right, but I did a CCNA course a few years back and thought I remembered that if it wasn't formatted it still appeared in explorer but you couldn't do anything with it...?
No - if a partition is not formatted then it will not be visible in Windows Explorer. It will be visible under Disk Management on Windows 2000 (and XP I presume - not sure what the equivalent is on 9x/Me - perhaps simply FDISK?) which is accessible by right clicking on the My Computer desktop shortcut, choosing Manage then selecting Computer Mangement\Storage\Disk Management. Similarly if there is unused/unpartitioned disk space. There ccould possibly be BIOS related reasons why the 10GB hard disk was partitioned with only a single 2GB partition, particularly if this is an old PC, in which case you may need a BIOS upgrade to access the full disk:
If this stuff is complete gobbledygook to you and you can't afford to attempt a full reinstall/repartition/reformat with the possibility of losing everything and experimenting a bit before getting things right then you would be well advised to get some help from somebody with suitable technical expertise/experience. The PC Guide linked above is an excellent resource for anybody tinkering with PC hardware/software or wondering how it all works and fits together. As is this for PC and lots of other stuff:
Folks,
Thanks for your guidance, I have recovered the missing part of the Hard Drive . In windows Explorer I now have C and D for the hard drive ( and drive E is the CD rom). These drives C & D represent 21% & 79%
respectively. What I would now like to do now is to have only the one drive i.e 100% of the hard disk capacity.
All ideas welcome.
Regards,
Horse.
You are actually better having 2 or more partitions on the hard drive. You can then backup your critical data from one drive ot the other and if one goes pear-shaped it is more straighforward to recover data from the uncorrupted partition.
Easiest route would be to get an application called Partition Magic (that's what it used to be called anyway) which can do this for you. Not sure if there is a demo or whether you would need to buy it.
You just need to move all (any ?) data off D, delete the partition and then resize C to fill the empty space.
I used to use a tool called presizer but this seems to have disappeared.
You could just boot from floppy, select the partition you wanted to resize and specify the new size - the application would then take care of simply moving the blocks of data back and forth or even just changing the partition table. Most commercial OS's at the time thought this was not possible. Saved me loads of time and effort.
QTParted is a GNU/Linux tool very similar to PartitionMagic and works with Windows partitions. Just used it yesterday to resize and existing NTFS partition in order to create a separate one for the Windows 2000 page file. The easiest way to get/use it is probably as part of one of the free GNU/Linux "live" bootable CD distributions such as Knoppix or Kanotix. Download the ISO CD image, burn it (as an ISO image not a file) to a CD-R[W] and just boot from it into GNU/Linux. Very handy system admin tool even if you don't otherwise use GNU/Linux!
> You are actually better having 2 or more partitions on the hard drive. You can then backup your critical data from one drive ot the other and if one goes pear-shaped it is more straighforward to recover data from the uncorrupted partition.
Another good reason to have two partitions is to reserve one for the virtual memory pagefile (in Windows 2000 and XP at least - can't remember how 9x/Me does VM) so that the pagefile partition is protected from fragmentation and should perform more efficiently over time. Of course backing up data to a separate partition is also a good idea but an even better idea is a separate disk or some other form of more comprehensive backup mechanisms/procedures (e.g. CD-R[W] etc.).
Backing up data to a second partition on a single disk is false security.
It is the same concept as keeping a second paper copy of files in a different drawer of the same filing cabinet as the originals. It protects against a very basic level of problem, but not against catastrophic loss. In practice the chances of a partition going bad are pretty small compared to the chances of a disk going bad (which are relatively small to start with). This is because the disk is a physical device and so is liable to getting a bang or a drop. A partition is a logical device (on the physical disk) and as such it would normally take a problem with the OS to cause problems with the partition. It is far more likely that the disk will get damaged than the partition.
To use the filing cabinet analogy - if someone drops the original file out the window you still have the other copy in the filing cabinet. This is good. If someone sets fire to your building or a leak develops over your cabinet both copies are destroyed at the same time because they have the same physical container. This is bad.
For backups to provide any sort of comfort they really need to be to a different physical device or preferably to a different location. Easiest way these days is to burn them to CD every so often and leave the CD in someone elses house. The importance of the backup obviously depends on the environment - sole trader with a single machine very important, home user with games not important.
Folks,
Thanks for your valued comments. I think Zag is right in his explanation of backing up files. On my own PC I back up to a re-writable CD for important items. This enables you to extract the information on a completly different PC if your own went bonkers. As I am just setting up this PC for my son (a 7 year old) wheather it crashes or not doesn't really matter. Anyway I engaged the services of "fdisk" last night and deleted both drives and created 1 single drive with the 10 gig on same. After loading windows - bingo everything is now OK. Thanks for your help.
Regards,
Horse.
I want to partition my hard drive create D: , I'm following the instructions (win xp, logged as Admin) using Disc Management but can't do the following;
"Right-click an unallocated region of a basic disk, and then click New Partition, or right-click free space in an extended partition, and then click New Logical Drive. "
My Disc 0 shows 2 bars ---31mbFAT ----- (C37.2mb ntfs
should there be an "unallocates section on Disc0 ? should I reduce size of C: to create it ? how?
pjq
37.2mb ntfs