HD file system madness

  • Thread starter Thread starter Arkady
  • Start date Start date
A

Arkady

Hello !

I have a 80GB Maxtor HD. I had a complete system crash a
couple of weeks ago, and had to reformat/reinstall
everything. Along the way I made 2 partitions ; 6GB
(system) and 70GB(storage). In an act of sillyness by me,
I made the 70GB patrition a FAT32 File System.
A few days ago I realised I needed to change it to NTFS,
and so I did. Using Partition Magic. No help files or
quick reference warned of any problems that might cause.
But boy, it did! From then on I have been having Blue
Screens of Death every 30-40 minutes, complaining about
ntfs.sys, atapi,sys and some other HD-related things.
That happens mainly while I try to install programs.

The even bigger problem is that I have no way of backing
up the data I have on the large partition and I can't
afford to loose that info.


Tech info : The HD is fully de-fragmented, scandisk shows
no errors. I have Windows XP SP1 with all the latest
possible updates.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem ?

Thanks !
 
Hello !

I have a 80GB Maxtor HD. I had a complete system crash a
couple of weeks ago, and had to reformat/reinstall
everything. Along the way I made 2 partitions ; 6GB
(system) and 70GB(storage). In an act of sillyness by me,
I made the 70GB patrition a FAT32 File System.
A few days ago I realised I needed to change it to NTFS,
and so I did. Using Partition Magic. No help files or
quick reference warned of any problems that might cause.
But boy, it did! From then on I have been having Blue
Screens of Death every 30-40 minutes, complaining about
ntfs.sys, atapi,sys and some other HD-related things.
That happens mainly while I try to install programs.

The even bigger problem is that I have no way of backing
up the data I have on the large partition and I can't
afford to loose that info.


Tech info : The HD is fully de-fragmented, scandisk shows
no errors. I have Windows XP SP1 with all the latest
possible updates.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem ?
Click to expand...

What caused your complete system crash a couple of weeks ago? I'd guess
the same problem is causing you grief now. Fix the hardware problem -
don't just reinstall XP.
 
Well actually, File System madness caused the problem
last time aswell, but that time it was caused by me
trying to convert my NTFS HD into a FAT32 one(I wanted to
try Linux). The whole thing crashed in the meanwhile.

Also, I don't have that much money to buy a new HD. Ahh.
 
Hello !

I have a 80GB Maxtor HD. I had a complete system crash a
couple of weeks ago, and had to reformat/reinstall
everything. Along the way I made 2 partitions ; 6GB
(system) and 70GB(storage). In an act of sillyness by me,
I made the 70GB patrition a FAT32 File System.
A few days ago I realised I needed to change it to NTFS,
and so I did. Using Partition Magic. No help files or
quick reference warned of any problems that might cause.
But boy, it did! From then on I have been having Blue
Screens of Death every 30-40 minutes, complaining about
ntfs.sys, atapi,sys and some other HD-related things.
That happens mainly while I try to install programs.

The even bigger problem is that I have no way of backing
up the data I have on the large partition and I can't
afford to loose that info.


Tech info : The HD is fully de-fragmented, scandisk shows
no errors. I have Windows XP SP1 with all the latest
possible updates.

Any ideas on how to fix this problem ?

Thanks !
Click to expand...


Is the Event Viewer showing any errors ?

This sounds to me like a hardware problem. Did you partition and
reformat the disk from scratch when you reinstalled ?

What was the last hardware change you made to your system prior to the
first crash ?
 
Well actually, File System madness caused the problem
last time aswell, but that time it was caused by me
trying to convert my NTFS HD into a FAT32 one(I wanted to
try Linux). The whole thing crashed in the meanwhile.

Also, I don't have that much money to buy a new HD. Ahh.
Click to expand...

NTFS-to-FAT32 sounds like a Real Bad Idea for a system partition.

6GB is a little tight for XP, and you've got gobbs of space
for Linux in the other partition.

If you started from an 80 GB NTFS disk, with hindsight, I'd use one of
the tools to shrink your NTFS disk to 10GB NTFS and then partition the
rest of the disk like this.

4GB FAT32 shared between XP and Linux
1GB Linux swap partition
Whatever is left over for whatever the preferred file
system type is for your distro (EXT2/EXT3/ReiserFS)

Shrinking an NTFS partition is a no-brainer in any partition tool. For
mature systems I do a defrag and a chkdsk /f first, just incase there
are some file system problems that could screw up the repartition
tool.

Every Linux install I've ever done has automatically found the XP/w2k
system in the first partition and set up multi-boot. (Youi have to
install XP first)

I've done setups like this lots of times, but I use Partition Magic.
Look to the Linux usenet groups for the specifics of the partirion
tools that come with Linux.
 
Well actually, File System madness caused the problem
last time aswell, but that time it was caused by me
trying to convert my NTFS HD into a FAT32 one(I wanted to
try Linux). The whole thing crashed in the meanwhile.

Also, I don't have that much money to buy a new HD. Ahh.
Click to expand...


With some scrounging you can probably find an usable IDE disk
in a machine being discarded. 12GB is plenty for lots of Linux
learning. It can be installed as a seconday disk in your PC.

A 2GB disk is enough if you're a real hacker and don't use the GUI
interfaces :-)
 
Back
Top