stillgreen2
asked on
Lost Recovery Partition and more in reformat
Have a new HP DC5800 desktop where I formatted the drive with Partition Magic 8.0 into 4 primary drives and decided I did not want that configuration/
I then reformatted the hard drive using XP computer management tool and came up with one NTFS drive where I installed XP pro. Lost the HP recovery drive in the process.
Now, I cannot use Partition Magic as I get an immediate error "Error 117 Partition's drive letter cannot be identified".
When I run Partition Table Doctor, it first finds and correct an error in the number of sectors and then it sees my hard drive as one large partition ("Free") with no drive letter that is not active. If I run the rebuild partition segement, I see the 4 previous primary drives but I am only able to choose to restore 2 of them.
I do not find any ckdsk errors, surface or sector errors.
What's the smartest course of action to take here to end up with a healthy hard drive with 3 partitions including the recovery partition (or do I really need that?). Not too techie, probably shouldn't be doing any of this.
Thanks in advance :) Learning as fast as I can read.
I then reformatted the hard drive using XP computer management tool and came up with one NTFS drive where I installed XP pro. Lost the HP recovery drive in the process.
Now, I cannot use Partition Magic as I get an immediate error "Error 117 Partition's drive letter cannot be identified".
When I run Partition Table Doctor, it first finds and correct an error in the number of sectors and then it sees my hard drive as one large partition ("Free") with no drive letter that is not active. If I run the rebuild partition segement, I see the 4 previous primary drives but I am only able to choose to restore 2 of them.
I do not find any ckdsk errors, surface or sector errors.
What's the smartest course of action to take here to end up with a healthy hard drive with 3 partitions including the recovery partition (or do I really need that?). Not too techie, probably shouldn't be doing any of this.
Thanks in advance :) Learning as fast as I can read.
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If you've already got XP installed and working well, that's fine. I'd still structure the disk with two partitions -- one for the OS, one for your data. If you want more, there should be a good reason for it (e.g. multi-booting, etc.).
Create a bootable Boot-It media (CD or floppy); boot to Partition Work (CANCEL, OK, Partition Work); and detail exactly what it shows for your current partition structure.
... then describe what you want to achieve with the additional partitions -- generally one for the OS; one for data is plenty. Some like to use a dedicated partition for the images ... but there's no real advantage to that.
Create a bootable Boot-It media (CD or floppy); boot to Partition Work (CANCEL, OK, Partition Work); and detail exactly what it shows for your current partition structure.
... then describe what you want to achieve with the additional partitions -- generally one for the OS; one for data is plenty. Some like to use a dedicated partition for the images ... but there's no real advantage to that.
ASKER
When I use the disk part command my disk type is coming up as "07" rather than IDE or something such. I have never seen this before and can't seem to find anything on Google. Is this part of the problem I'm having creating partitions on this disk?
You've apparently "messed up" the partition table structure; but it's easily recoverable. Post what Boot-It shows for the current partition structure of the disk, as I noted in my last post. i.e. list the details shown in the center of the Partition Work screen -- the one that looks like this:
Partition-Work---HD2.jpg
Partition-Work---HD2.jpg
ASKER
Should I reformat the HD again? I do have the recovery disks from HP and the OEM XP pro disk (and a corrupted Office Trial disk too).
Can I reinstall XP without using the HP recovery disk first? If so, is that what you're telling me to do?
I did already try using the Partition Doctor to recompile the partitions. It was apparently not successful. The computer works fine. Just won't let me work with my partitions.
Is not a problem to reformat. I don't want as many partitions as on my old computer but I do like to have at least a couple.