DeltaX and Hard Drives

I have a very peculiar hard drive problem which has me completely stumped.
My new system specs are Gigabyte K7T Triton (Via KT 600 chipset),XP 2500,512 MB Kingston PC 2700 memory,two identical Maxtor 80 GB 8 MB cache 7200 hard drives,CDRW,DVD Rom,Gainward GeForce2 Ti450 video card, SB live 5.1 and Windows XP Pro.
The two hard drives were in my previous set up. I changed my system due to a motherboard failure. The hard drives worked fine and do so in my new setup except for the fact that whichever hard drive is in the Slave position is recognized by the BIOS and Windows as only 32.5 GB in size. Presently this drive is one large partition. The BIOS is set to Auto Detect the hard drives.
When I first set up this new system my present Master was the Slave, It was not fully recognized as 80 GB,so I disconnected this drive,and made the other drive the Master,with the "first" drive disconnected.
The Win XP Pro installation process somehow fixed the size (I wish I could remember exactly how) and it was then recognized as 80 GB. I installed Windows XP Pro and set up three partitions. My problem is that the other,the "first" Master
hard drive is now in the Slave position and is only seen as 32 MB. I have double checked both drives' jumpers and cables. I am really fearful of doing anything which might impair my present Master drive for it took me many hours to set it up.
I am at a loss as to how to proceed to get the second HD seen at it's 80 GB size or what and where this problem originates. I need it to backup over 54GB of music,etc. This is my first Gigabyte motherboard.
I could realy use some help with this. I have mailed Gigabyte tech support but have no answer yet.
Also the system does not shut down except by holding the power button for 4 seconds (after clicking Shut Down)If I don't use the Power button the system will restart Windows. This "button shut" down works OK--no data loss or boot up problems the next time I start up,but I have always had the screen Shut Down power off the system automatically.
Any detailed help will be greatly appreciated.

Hi biday78,

Have you formatted the drives using FAT32 by any chance? Because it sounds as if you might have run into the 32GB FAT32 limit that you get in Win2000/XP:

http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/FAT32.htm

No, the drives have always been formatted in NTFS.
I have been wondering if I FDISK-ie delete the one existing partition,create two or three new partitions and then format the dive again,would that then get the drive recognized at its' true 80GB size. If I do this should I disconnect the present Master drive just to be safe. I'd freak if I messed that drive up after spending many hours setting it up just so. Can I FDISK a drive in the Slave position using a Win 98 Start Up disk,then let XP's Comp Management format each new partition? I have Partition magic installed on the present Master drive.
I really am kind of lost and a little spooked
by all this.

Hi biday78,

I am concerned about any data you may have on both hard drives. Is your configuration where you can back up and/or burn to disk this data. It is awfully easy to wipe the data out or make it inaccesible by one keystroke when using FDisk.

XP can partition, install NTFS file system, but in the doing so what will happen to any data at this stage? With a backup if you find you have to start over and do a clean install, you can then pull the files you need from your backup.

Hope this helps a little. :)

biday78,,Have you looked into using Maxtors 'MaxBlast' drive utility? If it's anything like WD's drive tool(and i believe it is), it may help you install your drive to full capacity. Barring,of course, any limitation problem somewhere else. Personally, i would consider partitioning your drive(s) into smaller chunks. i.e. smaller than 32GB per partition...

MaxBlast 3 is located here

There is only about 1GB worth of data on the present Slave drive. I can back this up onto the Master, so no data loss
The question is how best to proceed with getting the Slave drive recognized as its' full 80 GB size. The more I research the more I am coming to believe the problem is on the drive itself (probably due to changing my system and my screw up doing the fresh install of Win XP Pro).
What should I do if this was the only drive I had to put into this new setup? The former OS is gone. Once I get it fully recognized I can put it back into he Slave position and rehook up my Master drive.

The Max Blast does have diagnostic tools in it. Run that against the hdd and see what it says. Ridgerunr posted the link.

I may have have missed something here, but how are the two hard drives connected to the MOBO?

Double check the jumper settings as well - you may be inadvertantly setting the 32GB limit while setting the Slave drive. I've done this myself with a Maxtor, it very easy to misread the setting diagram.

Train,,,:p ,,,:D

Hi All, Found a little "how to" article while reading this afternoon:

Darkness Falls

When a hard drive voices that dainty little "gronk" that we know and dread, the first question most of us ask of users is, "Do you have a backup?" Sometimes, miracle of miracles, the users say yes, and we cheer—until they begin working on their freshly restored system and find out about all of the things that weren't backed up.

Is it their fault? No way. They're victims of Mr. Gates' habit of tucking important Windows files into carefully hidden directories. The rationale, I gather, is that if users can't get at the files, they can't do damage. (And why would you need to get at the files, after all? Windows will take care of you.) In deciding on this strategy, Microsoft missed one critical point: Stuff happens. Bad stuff. Hard drives that go "tick, tick, tick" and corrupt themselves. Power failures at inopportune moments that cause heads to do rude things during a write. Hardware failures that make charming coasters out of pieces of magnetic media. Disks that go bump in the night.

The Hunt Begins
Sadly, hard drives have become less reliable over the past couple of years, as manufacturers yield to pressure to provide higher capacity at lower cost. Ask your friendly reseller, and chances are he'll tell you that he's been seeing unprecedentedly high failure rates across most manufacturers' IDE disks. (One reseller quoted up to a 40% return rate on some brands.) That makes disk-to-disk backups scary. That makes even the most reliable operating system unsafe. You can't have "safely" hidden files on a system if the disk it lives on is at risk of curling up and dying. And that means we have to know what those hidden Windows files are, and how to find them, and how to back them up.

A recent hard drive crash sent me on just that quest.

The disk had managed to corrupt itself to the point that it wouldn't boot, but enough was intact that it could be mounted as a secondary drive.

NOTE

Because the disk in this case was formatted as an NTFS volume, it had to talk to Windows 2000 Professional or XP Professional; file locations mentioned here apply to those operating systems.

Documents
Finding the user's documents was easy: The My Documents folder is top-of-mind for most users because they use it daily, and had been backed up. But E-mail, Internet favorites, cookies (at least the ones storing site login data), PDA files, and all sorts of other things stored hither and yon had to be ferreted out and rescued.

Then the hunt could continue in earnest.

TIP

Open Windows Explorer and correct one of those "helpful" Windows features that causes more trouble than it's worth (see Figure 1). Select Tools, Folder Options, click the View tab, and select the options to display the filename in the title bar and/or the address bar. Deselect the options that hide extensions of known file types and protected operating system files, and select the option to display hidden and system files. Then click Apply, and click the "Like Current Folder" button. You can now see everything that can be seen.

Figure 1 Stop Windows from "helping you" by hiding important files. This is the Windows 2000 dialog; Windows XP differs slightly.



TIP

Why is this important? Simple: If you can't see it in a directory listing, Windows won't copy it. So you can copy the entire Documents and Settings folder, and unless you've changed those parameters, you'll only get a third of the actual data—and very little of the critical stuff. Nasty, but true.

E-mail and Address Book Information
Salvaging E-mail is usually near the top of everyone's list. If Outlook Express if the program of choice, its files can be found in the following oh-so-intuitive location:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application
[ccc] Data\Identities {<a very long alphanumeric string unique to the UID>}
[ccc]\Outlook Express
Grab the whole Outlook Express directory, but note that this doesn't preserve your address book. That lives here:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book
The address book file is called <username>.wab.

Outlook, on the other hand, by default stashes its local files here:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
The critical files have the extension .pst—they contain mail, contacts, and so on that the user has stored locally. It's a good idea to search the entire drive for .pst files if you can, because users can manually create these archives and store them anywhere. If they're still using a version prior to Outlook 2000, do a search for files with the .pab extension to recover the Personal Address Book (Outlook 2000 and later dispense with this artifact).

Internet Explorer Favorites and Cookies
Many users have huge and complex Internet Favorites lists; you can rescue them from here:

\Documents and Settings\<username>Favorites
Grab the whole directory. While you're in the vicinity, cookies are just a couple of directories north:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Cookies
I'm inclined to omit cookies, but some users have stored site registration information that they can't easily recover otherwise, so the best thing to do is tuck the cookie info in a safe place and put them back if needed later.

Desktop Settings and Shortcuts
The Desktop folder contains the files and shortcuts on the user's Windows desktop:

\Documents and Settings\<username>\Desktop
This file is handy, but not mandatory unless the user stores actual files on the desktop rather than shortcuts to those files.

CAUTION

It's a Very Bad Idea to try to pull the entire Documents and Settings folder from a bad drive directly into the Documents and Settings folder on a newly built drive. Sure, it seems like a convenient way to put a system back to the way it was, but that's the problem—"the way it was" is not working, so you may corrupt the new operating system installation. Let Windows build a shiny new profile on the new drive so you have a clean operating system; then selectively drop in the above items from the old disk. I actually create an Old Disk directory, copy all the salvaged data into it, and then carefully put it into the new profile (after making a copy of the new operating system's version of the profile, just in case).

Other Files
Microsoft isn't the only vendor to put data files into unexpected places. If the owner of the sick drive is a Palm user, for example, you'll need to recover the user directory from here:

\Program Files\Palm\<Palm username>
Yes, the user can synch to the new drive to rebuild the active files, but unless you recover that directory, all the archives will be lost. When you rebuild the system, you can stuff those files under My Documents, by the way, and reconfigure Palm Desktop to find them there.

Scanner users with PaperPort also need extra help—the program dumps its data files in a subdirectory off its program directory. Many tax software packages and accounting programs do the same thing (and those files you don't dare lose). In fact, if at all possible it's a good idea to quickly skip through all the directories under Program Files (and any likely candidates off the root directory) to find misplaced data. And when you upgrade a program, make sure you know where the new version puts its data and adjust the backup accordingly—sometimes it changes, and you could have an unpleasant surprise when you need to restore data.

Keeping the Fire Alight
Once all is happy on the hard drive front (and the corpse of the old disk has been disposed of), take a few minutes to set up a backup for all the files you've so painstakingly tracked down. Like the search for the Holy Grail, this quest for files should be a one-time experience.

Quote:

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Originally posted by K G G


Well said, Nix, well said. Thank Goodness for flextime :D

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And it's coming back

Regarding greengoose's comments above: the absolute first thing I ever do on a clean install (reinstall) is go into the View options and UNHIDE ALL FILES. I understand Micropoop's intentions on hiding those little suckers, but I need to see those system files if I'm gonna get anything done. I've sen it here in the forums that folks get mighty confused ("I don't have that file on my computer...Why? or "My copy is greyed out and I can't do anything with it...Why?). As long as one knows well enough not to delete files they don't know what they are for, then one should be OK with those files 'showing".

As for DrMDJ and his two-part posts: If I told him once, I've told him a thousand times...they need to be THREE full page parts and in size 5 font in BOLD plus full color illustrations! He never listens to me....

Hi All,

Been tied up with a project for a couple of days.

Got a question for all of you.

Have we covered hard drives well enough to start a new thread on multibooting do you think?

The reason I ask this is there has to me been quite a bit left out of the theory of operation and the coverering of the interface, software and hardware, which ensures that your data gets saved to the hard drive and extracted when you need it. Also we have alot of hard drive problems come up that are the identical problem time after time on the forum.

I am trying to make this better and I would like all of your opinions based on your perspective. :) :)

I think we should carry on a bit longer with this one, as you say there's a lot we haven't covered yet.

I'd like to say something about interfaces - namely that as things stand they are little more than a marketing gimmick. The limitation on data throughput on a hard drive is currently limited by the drive mechanics, and gives a throughput of less than the ATA66 interface can handle - even on 10,000 RPM drives. ATA100/133 or the SATA 150 interfaces will offer only a marginal improvement in throughput, if any at all. And it's all very well the drive makers crowing about how the SATA interface will ramp up to 600 MB/sec, but unless they're planning on a 100,000 RPM drive any time soon, then it's a bit of a pointless exercise :D

There are a lot of nice things about SATA drives, but the interface speed shouldn't be an important consideration, even though it's all anyone ever seems to mention.

The important numbers on a hard drive are the:

RPM (speed of rotation of the platter)

Seek times (how fast the head can move to the required cylinder)

Latency (how long before the required sector can be accessed after the head is over the cylinder)