Dash you, Norton

[JohnnyMalaria]

Gosh diddly darn that Partition Magic

[edited for universal appropriateness]

[racer-x]

I agree, it can ruin your day........

I've been using a nice little free tool called Partition Manager. It's a dos tool that you boot-up to. It was created by some Russian dude and it works great. It has never failed me yet and I've used it quite a bit. I made a boot CD and put the utility in the root directory. It will let you resize existing partitions as well as creating new ones. It also lets you hide partitions and create a boot loader in case you want to install multiple OS's....................

[redwudz]

No, you really didn't need to say it here.

[JohnnyMalaria]

No, you really didn't need to say it here.

Sorry - would you prefer I edit it?

[redwudz]

I think you could express your sentiments as well with some different allusions. We do try to be 'family oriented' here.

[aedipuss]

i for one don't find it anything but a warning that if said more politely might not be as effective. do the forums get that many peeps under 13ish that it might cause a parental uproar? there's worse on u.s. primetime network tv these days. ok, so the damn might have been better off without the n....

but i am intrigued, what the heck did it do?

[Noahtuck]

Don't make me pull up the 2 infamous Baldrick thread's 8)
:P

At least JohnnyMalaria Bleeped the $#!*




On note though.....
What would be a good program to make one partition smaller and another one larger by say one gig without losing any info on either drive ??

I've heard of some but was always afraid to try them as i would hate to lose any info on my secondary drives...

[JohnnyMalaria]

i for one don't find it anything but a warning that if said more politely might not be as effective. do the forums get that many peeps under 13ish that it might cause a parental uproar? there's worse on u.s. primetime network tv these days. ok, so the damn might have been better off without the n....

but i am intrigued, what the heck did it do?

Well, a while back it screwed up an external drive. I used it as FAT32 (as they usually come) and put some important files on there for work. I decided to use the (significant) empty space for video so needed to convert it to NTFS. Rather than convert the whole thing, I thought I'd just shrink the partition and create a new NTFS one. Stupidly, I chose to use PM. Such a simple request - shrink the existing partition. Well, it screwed up and left it as RAW format. (I found a freeware tool to retrieve the data). It's remained that way - until today.

Fast forward to today. I have a complex multiboot system but have gotten to the point that I don't use a number of the OS installations, plus my Vista partition was getting full. I decided to remove the unused partitions and merge them with the Vista one. Well, Vista's disk manager let me delete them. It can resize partitions, too, but not the active system partition.

I rebooted to XP and decided to use PM. Being extremely wary, I chose to create a copy of the entire Vista partition on one of my external drives. To do this, I needed to shrink it. So I merrily set PM that task. After a few minutes, it stopped doing anything leaving me no alternative that to kill it. It left the entire disk unreadable (lots of unhelpful "Error #46, Seek error").

After researching for about half an hour on Google, I find a solution - simply run chkdsk on it. Except it didn't have a drive letter. I managed to force a drive letter for it. Fixed! Wonderful. During my searching, I came across a little known "problem" with PM - it doesn't work well with >300GB drives.

So, I tried the whole thing again with a smaller external drive. That was successful and so I had a back up partition of my Vista installation.

Next step - merge the original Vista partition with the newly created empty ones. About half an hour later the process "finished" but, this time, showed the entire hard drive as RAW format and with only one huge partition. That's everything - all my OS installations, programs, projects etc etc etc. I chose NOT to try to "fix" the RAW partition.

I opened XP's disk manager and - miraculously - all the partitions were there. Phew.

Time to reboot and go into Vista.

Windows did not start correctly. A recent hardware or software change might
be the cause.

If you have a Windows installation disc, insert the disc and restart your
computer. Click system recovery options, and then choose a recovery tool.
(Startup Repair, available in some versions of Windows, can automaitcally
diagnose and fix startup problems.)

If you do not have this disc, contact your system administrator or computer
manufacturer for assistance.

Status: 0xc0000225

Yep - I couldn't get back into Vista. Thankfully, I did have the Vista installation DVD to hand and was able to successfully fix things such that I could boot into Vista.

Total time: 5 hours to increase my Vista partition size by about 40GB + three near-cardiac arrests along the way.

(Microsoft saved my bacon three times during the whole saga)

[This equals the frustration earlier this week - 6 hours to change my car's starter motor - "remove the two mounting bolts" - yeah, right]

[aedipuss]

hehe stories to tell the grandkids oneday.... the only real horror tale i have of norton is of systemworks one day optimizing my registry so well it never booted again. had to reformat/reinstall XP. but auto repair stories could go on forever. your car's not a nissan by any chance is it?

[wtsinnc]

If you are looking for a good HDD partitioning application, go to www.sourceforge.net and download GPARTED. It's freeware and allows for deleting, creating, resizing, and formatting via an easy to understand GUI. The program also has an "undo" feature. Give it a shot, it works for me. While at sourceforge, you might also want to download DBAN, the best HDD erasing tool out there; it's also free software.

[JohnnyMalaria]

your car's not a nissan by any chance is it?

No. '95 Ford Explorer. First bolt - oh so easy. Second bolt about 5 inches from the first - well, all I can say is that a dealership would probably remove the exhaust system and uncouple the crankshaft to do it....