Hard Drive wiped!? MAJOR PROBLEM.

[WARP MAN]

I have a brand new Medion PC. It came with a 200gb hard drive partitioned into 3 partitions. All has been working fine.

However, today, I might have screwd up...I wanted to create a 4th partiton, so I loaded up Partion Magic (like I've done a million times before) and creAted a new 5gb partiton after all other partitions. Restarted, converted and all was well, I had my 4 partitions.

Later, I restarted my PC again and it wouldnt start, jsut froze on a black screen with a cursor line in the top left. I put my XP Home cd in to repair but it didnt find any windows - also listed under partitions was one big 127gb partition. I went into the recovery thing and typed dir to see if my fiels were still there, but all is gone.

I put the hard drive in my other pc, windowws picked it up..I decided to start from scartch so I formatted it in NTFS. It onyl did 127gb? Anyway. I put ti bacdk in my new pc and went to install windows on the 127gb partition. All seems to go ok...then I reboot. I continually get the windows in inspecting your hardware and then the initial install starts again...going in circles.

What is wrong?
Have I lost all my data?
Why is it only 127gb?
Worried to death here.

Thanks.

[Matrix_581]

Looks like you have lost it all,

127gig is the max size of hard disk windows xp can detect with out service pack 1 installed.

[WARP MAN]

Damn, Ok.

But why cant I reinstall, I boot from cd, get the blue screen checkign hardware, select c to install windows, it copies the files then restarts...then it all begins again. What's wrong with that?

[Matrix_581]

Um, maybe you are pressing a key when it says "boot from cd" the second time? if that makes sense

[Nuttapper]

Hi M8, looks like you have nothing to loose now, fdisk the drive and delete and re-create the the main partition, then start from scratch, boot from the cd, may be there is info on the drive thats causing your problem.

[WARP MAN]

Completley reformatted the drive. Still cant install Windows. Deffo not pressing the key when it says boot from cd, have also tried taking the cd out after the copying is completed (this just leaves me with black screen). At a total loss and dont know why Windows wont install.

I've reformatted and installed Windows before so I know I'm doing the right thing, It just doesnt seem to be working.

[I-wanna-be-unfamous!]

I don't know about windows xp but last time, when i try to hotswapped with both of my xbox hard-drive and my pc hard-drive on the same ide cable, my xbox hdd for some reason corrupted my pc hard-drive! i was so piss that i have to reinstall windows again, I use the windows 2000 pro cd at first to format my hdd disk to NTFS but it said that the drive can't be format for some reason i forgot so i have to use the windows 98 startup disk and use fdisk to format the whole hdd with an msdos partition then use windows 2000 to format it to ntfs and then install windows from there :(

[Van Nugent]

Hotswapping IDE hard drives? Someone must be out of their mind!

[Neo]

Not really Van, its an alternative to buying a game a memory card. But that would not be the cause of your curropt hd (i-wanna).

127 is not the limit for XP. Its 137, as the same for some old bioses.. The hard drive being partitioned into 3 partitions sounds kinda of fishy. If the mobo never supported 48 bit LBA (137gbs +) then having mutliple partitons will solve that problem. Which might be the reason why your not getting the full extent of your hard drive.

Don't use FDISK to format it. Use the built in app in the win xp install. If that still doesn't help, then create 3 partitions (with win xp install) again and see if that works.

[PhilEnfield]

Sounds like you have reformatted the drive a few times, but have you unpartitioned it and repartitioned it ?

I had some probs a while ago, using an old version of Partition Magic to create NTFS partitions .... it seemed to corrupt the partitions somehow. I upgraded to Partition Magic 8 and the problem went away.

Also .... may be a silly question, but are you sure your Windows XP disk is good ? .... I had probs installing from a cdr copy and found it worked better with the Burner drive .... just a thought ;)

[WARP MAN]

Ok, solved.

Thanks to this site - again!

What I did was I deleted the huge 190GB partition and partitoned it it into 2 new partitions. For some reason this finally allowed ne to install Windows XP Home SP1 (as my XP PRO Disc would only detect 130gb).

However, I have many more questions in my other topics.

[Neo]

Seems like your mobo doesn't support 48 Bit LBA then.