TeraByte Unlimited

Greetings all - not sure exactly what happened, but I thought I would see if it made sense to others. I have XP Pro, SP3 on my main drive (along with Bootit BM and a data partition). I also have a number of other SATA drives connected as additional storage (Asus P6X58D Premium MB). Have not had any issues. A couple of days ago, I wanted to see what the disk speeds looked like, so I installed HD Tune 2.55 based on comments out there. It seemed to work fine for all drives (6 SATA drives total) EXCEPT for the one with the E,F and G partitions on it (1 TB drive). For some reason it showed the drive characteristics just fine, but it would not show which partition letters were assigned to those partitions (all other drives were fine). No drives use extra primary partitions (all are 4 or less primary partitions - created with BING in the past mostly). When I rebooted the system, the one drive that had E,F and G on it had vanished. Bootit BM could see it, but the partition table looked funny (I forget exactly what I was seeing). After playing with it a bit, I noticed that the "limit primaries" box was unchecked (but I had never created any extra partitions etc on that drive) so I checked it. Hey presto, E and F came back and were fine, but G was gone. I tried (in Bootit BM) to recover the partition using that option. Prior to this, that drive had been working perfectly for many months (although I did slide partitions around/resize them with Bing several months ago). Finally ended up re-creating the partition "G" (400GB) and reloading from a backup I had. Does this sound like anything anybody has seen before ? Does HD Tune have issues anybody is aware of ? Whatever it was caused the entire drive to simply vanish while I was at the Windows XP level - not playing with the partitions etc at all.

All very odd - any comments from anyone this sounds familiar to would be appreciated.

mikey

Yes, I have seen the same thing. I had a partition disappear. It came back when I ran chkdsk on it and some errors corrected. I just posted this: File System Errors: http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ucf/vi ... ?f=2&t=562. I didn't mention the missing partition in my post, but I suspect they are caused by the same thing. And it is possibly what caused your problem.

Bill

Thanks Bill - this seems different - there was no corruption of the two partitions (I'm not sure in my poking around it wasn't me that managed to delete the third one). The whole drive (all 3 partitions) simply vanished from the windows environment - BootitBM could still see the drive although it looked like the partition table was empty (all zeros) although it did list the partition names and sizes) until I clicked the "limit primaries" - I have no idea why that was not checked or what had changed. The two that I didn't manage to mangle (that showed up when I checked the limit primaries) both passed both the normal chkdsk tool as well as letting Raxco Perfect disk look at them - it was also happy). I could not find a way in BootitBM to convince it to check the partitions for me - I know it does some sort of check any time you move/slide/resize a partition, but I couldn't find a way to get it to check without telling it to change something about a partition. Would be nice if that was in there some where. Never seen this before and this machine is normally very stable (I leave it on 24/7 and typically it is weeks between reboots - usually after installing a new version of something).

mikey

See the first quick link at:
http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/support-bootit-bare-metal.htm


"gpsmikey" wrote in message news:[email protected]...

Thanks Bill - this seems different - there was no corruption of the two
partitions (I'm not sure in my poking around it wasn't me that managed to
delete the third one). The whole drive (all 3 partitions) simply vanished
from the windows environment - BootitBM could still see the drive although
it looked like the partition table was empty (all zeros) although it did
list the partition names and sizes) until I clicked the "limit primaries" -
I have no idea why that was not checked or what had changed. The two that I
didn't manage to mangle (that showed up when I checked the limit primaries)
both passed both the normal chkdsk tool as well as letting Raxco Perfect
disk look at them - it was also happy). I could not find a way in BootitBM
to convince it to check the partitions for me - I know it does some sort of
check any time you move/slide/resize a partition, but I couldn't find a way
to get it to check without telling it to change something about a partition.
Would be nice if that was in there some where. Never seen this before and
this machine is normally very stable (I leave it on 24/7 and typically it is
weeks between reboots - usually after installing a new version of
something).

mikey

Yeah, I had looked at that but didn't think it applied here since it was NOT an external drive and it had (for months) been showing up just fine in windows (I use 2 of the 3 partitions on that drive daily, so it was not something I would have missed for a period of time. They were also all visible before I had run HD Tune to check the drive speeds - that was when I noticed that that was the only drive that HD Tune did NOT list the partitions for (I have 6 internal drives in this system). A quick Google search for "HD Tune corruption" basically turned up nothing either. Something caused the entire drive to vanish AFTER I had booted the system around the time I was checking the drive throughput. There was no reboot involved between when the partitions/drive was visible and when it simply vanished. Rebooting did not make them show up again either. I was just wondering what caused that and if anyone else had seen that before. While I can see something happening that would cause the drive to not show the next time I booted, this was a case of it was there then it was gone (from windows - HD tune could still see the drive and run the speed test on it (read only it claimed))

mikey

when you in bootit partition work, you can view mbr to see what the OSes
will see (the list of partitions in the MBR). I'm not sure how they got out
of there, unless they were all deleted, but the ones in the EMBR still
existed....


"gpsmikey" wrote in message news:[email protected]...

Yeah, I had looked at that but didn't think it applied here since it was NOT
an external drive and it had (for months) been showing up just fine in
windows (I use 2 of the 3 partitions on that drive daily, so it was not
something I would have missed for a period of time. They were also all
visible before I had run HD Tune to check the drive speeds - that was when I
noticed that that was the only drive that HD Tune did NOT list the
partitions for (I have 6 internal drives in this system). A quick Google
search for "HD Tune corruption" basically turned up nothing either.
Something caused the entire drive to vanish AFTER I had booted the system
around the time I was checking the drive throughput. There was no reboot
involved between when the partitions/drive was visible and when it simply
vanished. Rebooting did not make them show up again either. I was just
wondering what caused that and if anyone else had seen that before. While I
can see something happening that would cause the drive to not show the next
time I booted, this was a case of it was there then it was gone (from
windows - HD tune could still see the drive and run the speed test on it
(read only it claimed))

mikey

OK, thanks - at one point I did look at the mbr and noticed it showed all zeros although in "Partition work", it showed the partition names and sizes. Unfortunately, I don't really remember exactly what steps I took at what point there. Still don't understand what had zero'd the mbr out though. It would be nice if I had clearly documented just what I did to get there, but I didn't realize what was going on until after everything had fallen off the cliff (none of the other drives had any issues - all are SATA). Too bad I didn't have this all running in a VM so I could have grabbed the screenshots. Hindsight is wonderful

mikey