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Absurd partition problems under Win2k

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davestar

Golden Member
Here goes:

On my old 20 GB HD, I had 2 GB OS partition (c:, win2k) and an 18 GB partition (e🙂.
I just new components, including a 40 GB HD, so I planned to slave my old HD and boot from the new HD.
I defined the new HD as e: (NTFS) and installed win2k on it. No problems there, except now I can only see the 2 GB partition of my old drive, under drive c:.

So, under win2k, I reformatted c:, but as I should have expected, it remained a 2 GB partition.

So, I got a manufacturer util (which recognized the full 20 GB drive) and attempted to erase all data on the drive (I presume it zeroed all data). I reformatted (fat32) using that util and booted into windows to see.... 2 GB c:. I went back to the util and deleted the MBR and data and got the same results in windows.

So, I made a boot disk and used fdisk to get rid of partitions on the drive. Then I reformatted from DOS, booted into windows and saw.... 2 GB c:.

So, I got ranish partition manager, got rid of the partitions, and reformatted. Same 2 GB c: in windows.

So, I dropped my HD in my friends Mac, he made a 20 GB DOS partition and I dropped it back in my comp. Looked at the HD with ranish, which said that it wasn't formatted. Made a 20 GB fat32 partition and booted into windows. The win2k disk manager still saw only a 2 GB c:, but using windows explorer it saw a 20 Gb partition with a "trash" folder leftover from the Mac format. I tried to delete that but windows said it was corrupted and could not be deleted. I went back to ranish, and played with stuff in there (encountered a "no active partition set on this disk" message) but couldn't get any good results.

I have no idea where to go next. I'm thinking about deleting win2k from my new drive, reformatting everything and installing win2k on my new drive defined as c:. Any suggestions?????!?!?! Thanks for any help.

(Sorry for the length of the post. I'm treading in moderately unfamiliar territory here (esp with MBR stuff), and I didn't want to leave out somethign vital)
 
davestar, it certainly wouldn't hurt to zero out all of your hard drives with the manufacturer's utility and then install Windows 2000 onto that new 40GB drive. I think that would fix your problem with the 20GB drive. There's probably something in your Win2K install that's messed up that's causing this problem.

Like you I don't understand what's going on with that 20GB drive. You shouldn't have had any problems deleting those two partitions on the 20GB drive and then creating and formating a single 20GB partition.

You may want to make sure you're not having any hardware problems. Check the master/slave settings for the 2 hard drives then run a surface scan test using the manufacturer's utility.
 
I have a similar problem with my Win2k install right now and partitions. I was about to post the problem, but then did a search and found your thread. I think it's a similar problem.

My problem is that when I go to install Win2k, it leaves a 8 mb partition that's unformatted. I've tried everything to wipe this out including fdisk and the manufacturer's utility (Maxblast Plus). I was suspecting Maxblast Plus, so I even fdisked the drive wiping out all partitions and then went to install Win2k and it still won't give me one large partition. It just leaves that 1 chunk of 8 mb's left over for some reason. I don't think the problem is with Maxblast because it always sees the drive as one large 20 gb drive.

I don't mind giving up 8 mb's of space, but what's frustrating is if I install Win2k this way, I get the boot screen as if I were dual booting when I'm not. That's very annoying if I'm only running one OS on this disk.

The only thing that I can think is that my Win2k floppies got hosed somehow. For some odd reason, I can't install Win2k by booting it with the cd. I've tried everything there and can't figure it out. Try having the patience to do several installs from booting off of the 4 floppies. 😉 That's another story though..

Anyway.. I just can't figure out why Win2k insists on keeping that chunk of 8 mb's leftover and unpartitioned.

The hardware seems fine. I had another OS running perfectly on the drive. If something got hosed it was some time in between wiping out the old OS and installing this one.

If anyone has any ideas, I sure would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Sal
 
Windows 2000 and Windows XP leave the 8MB unpartitioned space for future use if you decide to convert your disk to a dynamic disk. The additional information used by the dynamic disk type is kept here.
 
fixed my problem the other night. seems that out of the 4 different types of slave jumper settings, i had only tried the wrong 3 😱 thanks for the response, owensdj
 
So.. Do I have to select Win2k every time I want to boot the machine then? I'd like to be able to boot the machine and not touch it until it's booted.

Was it just asking me if I wanted to boot into the partitioned space with Win2k or the unpartitioned 8 mb's until I got the whole thing installed?

Another thing.. When I use Maxblast, it says that I have a 19,960 mb's or something on a 20 gb drive, but Win2k says that I only have 19,060 or something like that. Is this correct? Is Win2k cheating me out of yet more space?

Thanks again.

Sal
 
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