How to un-swisskinfe a external hard drive?

[J.R.]

What is the quickest and easiest way to restore a hard drive to the way it was before swissknife was run? I have a 1 TB external drive that I ran swissknife on to try and split it into 2 500GB drives (playing with my Phillips DVP5990 player). When I ran Swissknife it worked and the 5990 picked it up and would play movies with no problem (AVI format) but when I plug the hard drive into my computer it says that there is only 461 GB of space instead of 1 TB or 2 500GB of space. I want my 1TB back!

Keep in mind that I am a "car guy" if you want your 49 Buick customized or your motor built I can do it but I have limited experience with computers but I can pick it up pretty fast so bear with me on this.

Thanks for any help.

[redwudz]

Easiest would be to run SwissKnife agan and delete both partitions, then make one new partition and convert it to NTFS. But you will lose all data on the drive.

Did your computer recognize the whole drive before converting to FAT 16 with SwissKnife? Most external drives that use USB are FAT 16 anyway, same as the 5990 uses. If you want to use the drive with a e-SATA connection, then NTFS may be the better choice.

When you have it hooked to the computer, go to 'Control Panels>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management' and you should see the drive and hopefully both partitions.

If you don't plan to use it with the 5990, Windows can also delete the partitions and repartition it back to a single one, but again you will lose all the data. But SwissKnife can also do that, and it might be faster and easier. After repartitioning, then you need to reformat the drive to NTFS for your computer.

If you want to keep the data and change partitions and formatting type, that can be a bit complicated. Easier to dump the data off it, than add it back in after you convert the drive.

EDIT: And I forgot to mention, welcome to our forums.

[T-Fish]

you can convert a fat32 partition to ntfs without losing data..
(wont work the other way around though)

however, i have no idea about swissknife, but if you used it to make two
partitions, then you should be able to undo this in swissknife.

[J.R.]

Ok I got it back down to one partition and got the storage space back but when I click on "My Computer" it isn't reading the drive (not even showing up). When I go into "Disk Management" it shows up there, how can I get it to show up in "My Computer"?

I will just be using the 4GB SD card and USB reader for movies through the 5990 from now on. It is much easier than dealing with the external HD. The 5990 will only read some AVI files and the ones it wont it only plays the audio, it won't read windows media files like the box says, I kinda feel like I got lied to.


Thanks guys! I will be saving this forum in my faves and will refer back to it!


Oh yeah, if it makes any difference the hard drive is a Seagate 1TB external desktop drive.

[MysticE]

The 5990 will only read some AVI files and the ones it wont it only plays the audio,

It seems that when it comes to Xvids the 5990 is not nearly as versatile as the previous 5982 was. Many are reporting playback problems.

[Ai Haibara]

I will just be using the 4GB SD card and USB reader for movies through the 5990 from now on. It is much easier than dealing with the external HD. The 5990 will only read some AVI files and the ones it wont it only plays the audio, it won't read windows media files like the box says, I kinda feel like I got lied to.

I'm not sure if there are limitations on the types of WMA files the 5990 will play, but I believe WMV videos have to be WM9-format (as well as be under the maximum DVD resolution (not exceed 720x576) and, of course, not have DRM). You can try republishing your WMVs with Windows Movie Maker, which might reconvert them to a WMV the 5990 will like.

As for the AVIs, you might run the ones that don't play properly through a utility such as GSpot or MediaInfo, and post the resulting info/screenshots from those utilities - maybe someone might be able to tell why the 5990 doesn't like them. (But to a new topic, probably, as I'm already diverging, here. )

[redwudz]

Ok I got it back down to one partition and got the storage space back but when I click on "My Computer" it isn't reading the drive (not even showing up). When I go into "Disk Management" it shows up there, how can I get it to show up in "My Computer"?

If you don't have any data to lose on it, repartition it within Windows Disk Management and format it there and it should show up. It's fairly automatic after you delete the existing partition. Just make very sure you are doing it to the correct drive. Or if you only see the partition in Disk Management, it probably just needs to be formatted, I would use 'quick format' as a full format will take quite a while on a large drive.

[jagabo]

The 5990 will only read some AVI files and the ones it wont it only plays the audio

AVI is a container -- a box you put audio and video in. That audio and video can be compressed with any of hundreds of audio and video compression schemes. The 5990 only plays Divx/Xvid (MPEG 4 part 2) encoded video in an AVI files. Even with those there are limitations. It doesn't play Xvid with 3 warp point GMC (no set-top Divx/DVD player does). It doesn't play resolutions over 720x576 (very few set-top Divx/DVD players do). If you check the Divx "Home Theater" spec you'll find that those limitations (and others) apply.

it won't read windows media files like the box says, I kinda feel like I got lied to.

WMV is also a container that can contain audio and video compressed with various versions of the WMV and WMA codecs. If I remember correctly, it plays back WMV1 and WMV3 encoded video and WMA2 encoded audio. It does not play WMV2 video or WMA1 audio. The player has the same resolution limitations with WMV as it does with AVI.

[cal_tony]

Well, If I may, I would like to add my question to this thread. I was just about to go to Swiss knife to partition my 1 TB external drive. It is fat32 now. It is new and has a few files on it in DVD format just to check if my 5990 would play them. It did, so I was about to partition the drive in two when I happened upon this thread. So, if Swiss knife is not the way to go, how do I partition the drive into 2 500gb partitions with out changing to NTFS as that would make using it on the 5990 impossible. I have an old version of Partition Magic laying around somewhere so I could use that, I guess, or will Windows XP do the partition without converting to NTFS?

Tony

[J.R.]

Well I copied all my files back to my internal HD and un-swissknifed the external HD. It did show back up on the computer after than and I did a full format back to NTFS (yeah that takes about half a day for a 1TB drive lol) so everything is back to normal. I will just use the eternal HD for storage of movies, music, and pics and when I want to watch a movie I will just copy it to my 4GB SD card.
It's not exactly what I wanted but it will work just as well. Thanks for all your help and like I said I will be referring back to this forum for any other questions!