cannot access Partition 2 after installing WXP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Garry
  • Start date Start date
G

Garry

Following a fresh reinstallation of Windows XP
Professional, I can no longer access the second partition
on the boot hard drive. Disk manager correctly gives the
name of the partition (DATA) indicates the size and that
it is "Healthy (Unknown Partition)."

This never used to be a problem with Win2k, which would
map any partition it could see (which, I believe, was ALL
of them). And it is very inconvenient, as I keep as much
of my stuff on this second partition so that I DON'T
loose it after I reinstall.

Is there any workaround within windows? Right now, the
only workaround I know of is to use a utility such as
Disk Image to copy the partition or to use an NT
installation on another drive to move the data.

Thanks,

Garry
 
Garry said:
Following a fresh reinstallation of Windows XP
Professional, I can no longer access the second partition
on the boot hard drive. Disk manager correctly gives the
name of the partition (DATA) indicates the size and that
it is "Healthy (Unknown Partition)."
Click to expand...

"Healthy (Unknown Partition)" is the way hidden partitions typically
show up in XP's Disk Management. Perhaps your second partition got
toggled to "hidden" somewhere along the way during the reinstallation.
I'm not sure if there is a native XP utility that will toggle it back to
unhidden (one of the MVPs will probably know, if there is), but there
are a number of third-party utilities that can easily do so, such as
PartitionMagic, BootIt NG, Partition Commander, Ranish Partition
Manager, et al. If you don't have something like that, the easiest way
would be to download the free utility ptedit.zip from
ftp.powerquest.com/pub/utilities. Extract ptedit.exe from within the
zipfile, boot from a DOS floppy (or Win98 startup floppy, or see
www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one), run ptedit.exe, and change the
appropriate partition type from hidden-NTFS/hidden-FAT32 to normal
NTFS/FAT32. Reboot into XP and see if the partition now shows up as it
should.
 
Nicholas,

I haven't had any problem initializing the disk (its the
boot disk). The problem I have is accessing the second
partition on the same disk. All the context options for
this partitionare greyed out except "Delete logical
drive."

BTW, I used Disk Image to clone this partition to another
drive and it is also not accessible!

Thanks,

Garry
 
Thank you Im Dan!

It was as simple as that. I unhid the partition with
Partition Magic and the drive was mapped at the next
bootup to WinXP and Disk Manager options were all
restored.

I guess I didn't think of this option since this was
never an issue in Win2k; as I recall, Win2k did not
automatically assign drive letters to hidden partitions
but all you had to do was go into Disk Manager and assign
one. I thought that MS had rigged WinXP to protect
multiple boot partitions from meddling by WinXP or to
make things difficult for unorthodox partitioning or
something.



Anyhow, thanks again,

Garry
 
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