PC said:
I was under the impression that you could download either a windows or a
floppy or CD-bootable version of ontrack disk manager from Western
Digital for the purpose of formatting and partitioning WD drives
(specifically, SATA drives).
I know that WD offers Acronis True Image and Data Lifeguard, but those
do not seem to perform basic drive formatting and partitioning
functions.
I know that other drive makers do (or have in the past) offered (at no
cost) a version of Ontrack Disk Manager which was customized or tied to
the specific drive maker's drives (for example, Seagate). Does WD offer
this as well - or only for their EIDE drives?
I have a standalone bootable CD, which claims to do partitioning.
I have yet to test it though, in terms of making changes. It boots
OK on my computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gparted
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/download.php
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gparted/files/gparted-live-stable/
I have an older version, gparted-live-0.4.5-5.iso (104,857,600 bytes)
and have burned the ISO9660 to a CD with Nero. I just booted it for
a test, and it displays the four primary partitions I have on each
of two disks. Since I've used up all my primary partitions, I
cannot do any tests right now.
Even though that disc is Linux based, it still knows how to handle
FAT32 and NTFS.
When I tested that Gparted CD a while ago, the prominent red "Exit"
button in the upper left hand corner did not work. I just discovered,
that right-clicking the desktop surface, and looking at the menu there,
provides some shutdown options, so you can exit from the environment,
once your partitioning is finished.
Before I tried that disc, I have used other Linux LiveCDs to prepare
hard drives. For example, the "fdisk" utility in Linux (Knoppix) allows
defining the basic size and partition type. So you can write your
own partition table with that. There are also various mk_xxxx utilities,
like mkfs.vfat and mkntfs, for formatting a partition, after you've
written and committed the partition table via fdisk.
I expect what the gparted CD would offer you, is better integration
of the partitioning and formatting features, so there is less
reading of manpages to get the job done.
I really like Linux for maintenance. I can't really stand to work
full time in a Linux environment. But for occasional visits, when
your Windows is broken, it's great.
For example, a couple hours ago, I managed to get a "missing hal.dll"
when WinXP was booting and I was stuck. I guessed this was due to some
partition table changes made while I was in Win2K (partition entries got
rearranged, which is dumb). Using Linux, it was relatively easy to open
"boot.ini" with kwrite, change the partition number in the file, save and
exit. On the next try, WinXP came right back up. You cannot beat it for a
repair environment, that gives you a browser to work with, while
you search for a repair recipe. One of the thing I have against some
other Windows repair methods, is the inability to use the Internet while
your computer is "broken".
The only warning I might have, about Linux and Windows, is the MBR.
The Windows install CD, if you expect it to install a Windows MBR,
must not find a signature like 0x55AA in the last couple of bytes
of sector zero of the disk. Seeing that value, tells Windows that
another boot manager is present. So when any Linux environment plays
with Windows disks, you have to pay attention to sector zero. Where
I've had problems, was doing a Linux OS test install on a hard drive,
and then Windows refuses to install on it later (couldn't reboot to
the hard drive, after the first set of files is copied). Erasing sector
zero, solves the problem (but sector zero also contains the four primary
partition table entries). So there is still a possibility of problems.
If you needed to keep the partition table entries, it is possible
something like "fixmbr" would be smart enough, to only fix the first
446 code bytes of sector zero. Fixmbr is available in the Windows recovery
console. I haven't experimented with that yet.
Paul
