Can I have one 186gb partition? Did I lose everything? (long)

rubix

Golden Member
Oct 16, 1999
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Ok this really sucks. I bought two 200gb Western Digital harddrives a while back and I formatted one to only 132gb and one to 186gb (the max). So I used the 132gb one for my D drive for downloads and game installs and stuff and my 186gb one mostly just for already backed up music (my music server).

My computer was on last night and when I came to it today the E drive was messed up and I can't access it and now everything on it is lost I think (150gb of data!). Since most of it was backed up it's not the biggest deal but it was a pain to get everything on it in the first place and organize it! Now I think this might happen to my other drive and I CAN'T have that happen. Partition Magic 8 already shows my D drive as only being 132gb now with no option to resize it... what happened to my other 50gb of unused/unformatted space that it usually shows? Is this thing about to fail too?

Both drives were using NTFS under WinXP SP1. I have a very old mb, an Abit BX6 rev 2.0 (440BX). Both of these drives are on 1 Promise Ultra100 TX2 controller (one drive per ide).

So my question is: Is it ok to use 1 partition per drive and use the max amount of space, 186gb, on my old mb if I use the Promise Ultra100 card? Or was this my mistake and this caused the E drive to fail after putting too much data on it? I thought it was only a problem when not using the Promise controller and putting the drives on the mb's ides?

How about if I buy a new system with an ABIT IC7 Canterwood i875 motherboard? Then could I plug both drives directly into the mb's ides and use the max space safely? I really need to know, I can't lose some of my data and I can't back it all up every single night.

Also, is there anyway to recover my E drive's data? It's unplugged right now. When trying to access it through My Computer it would hang the whole My Computer window and slow down my system. When using Partition MAgic 8 it would show up as being full (186gb used when only 150gb was really used) and the lable was screwy (it now had a label called ?0?). I am afraid to mess with this drive now and want to try to save the data.

Any help is appreciated.
 

J1600B

Senior member
Nov 15, 2002
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I had the same problem with my WD 200 GB after turning the power off manually several times because of a software lock up. Hard drive was unusable and windows couldn't see it. I checked with some shareware programs and the data was there but windows would not recognize it. Acquire GetDataBackNTFS and your problems should be solved like mine. I haven't had any problems since, but it is very unnerving to have a 200 GB drive die after turning the power off a few times.

As for the 132 GB partition, did you do it through windows? I think to get the full amt you have to use the WD tool and it of course has to be on the ATA card.

I too would like to know if its better to make several small partitions instead of the max 186. Hopefully someone can enlighten us.

One 200 GB may have gone bad if your PSU couldn't supply enough power. Mine died after turning power on and off without shutdown so maybe your PSU is underpowering it and its cutting out.
 

rubix

Golden Member
Oct 16, 1999
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Yeah I was having PSU probs at first and so I replaced my 300watt psu with a Zalman ZM400A-APF and everything seems to be ok.

For my 132gb partition D drive, I made this in Partition Magic and it worked fine for over a month. But now in PM it shows up like it is really a 132gb drive and shows no extra unformatted space. I just backed up all my data on this drive to a temp 38gb one I have and so I am going maybe delete everything and format it again, but it seems like PM only wants to make it go up 132gb now which is still wrong.

I don't know what the deal is but I have all this space for storage and I can't feel safe putting a single thing on my drives. I feel like my computer is practically unusable now, anything I do will just potentially be gone by the next day. Ironically the only reliable drive in my computer is my crappy 8gb one which is what I have WinXP and all my programs installed on.

I'll check out that program to try to recover anything from my other drive. Thanks for the advice. I think I should buy a new motherboard (and ram/cpu) because I think all my problems are a result of this old motherboard and/or the Promise Ultra100 card. I still don't know how big I can format these drives safely though.