hard drive access in winXP locks machine

[greymalkin]

alright i'm having nothing but problems this week! yesterday I plugged in a 20gb hard drive to my xp machine to partition/format it using the disk administrator or whatever XP calls it. It came up and asked me about the physical disk i think something like if I wanted to make it a dynamic disk..i said yes to this and set it up as a 20gb (minus formatting space)NTFS partition. I powered off my machine, took the HD out, placed it in a static bag and powered my machine right back on. I went to access my 200gb (X drive and I get a blank window that pops up and the machine freezes. I checked the cables, etc..no issues there. After rebooting I went back into disk administrator and my X: shows to be healthy. I can right click from there and go to explore and see all the contents of my x: drive. I can even browse around for a little bit before it locks up.

I tried running chkdsk in safe mode but after about 5 hours it still wasn't done. I went back into normal mode and ran chkdsk again, but from the console this time. It scanned the x: drive and found no errors/bad sectors.

so it seems as though thers something wrong with the way windows is seeing this drive but I don't know what to do other than try to find another big drive, copy everything over using xcopy/robocopy from the command prompt, then re-partitioning/formatting the drive.

any suggestions?

[simonko]

If you wanted to keep it as a separate drive you should of made it "basic". Making it "dynamic" you might have? spanned the drive with your 200GB (making windows wanting to see a 220GB drive).


Anyhow (with only your 200GB installed) first try performing a System Restore, a point prier to your problem. If that does work try Fixmbr and Fixboot using the Windows XP install disc, "recovery console" on the drive.

[greymalkin]

thanks! I was hoping there was something like that I could do.

yep I didn't understand exactly what "basic" and "dynamic" meant. Both the 200 and the 20 were set up as "dynamic" so your explanation makes perfect sense to me. I noticed next time I went to disk admin it still showed the 20gb in the list, it just had an x over it cause it was no longer connected. i thought that to be odd because usually once the drive is gone it doesn't show up in disk admin. the dynamic thing is what made it stick around. I did a little more poking around and found this jewel of information:

"Another big difference between basic and dynamic disks is there is no Master Boot Record (MBR) on a dynamic disk. Instead, it stores the layout of the disk volumes in a database stored on the last 1 MB of the disk."

which would be the last 1mb of the 20gb disk!

i'll definitely try your suggestions tonight!

thanks!