The idiot story continues

  • Thread starter Thread starter exray
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exray

On the 4th, I posted my confusing tale about how I'd trashed my store bought
computer hard drive, attempting to shrink the NTFS XP partition it came with
from 170 gig to something smaller, planning to essentially make it appear
like my old computer.

I had a disk error, it wouldn't boot, so I finally hit F10, got into the
recovery part of the drive -- the FAT32 part that HP stores its complete XP
installation on, and restored it to its "new from the store" condition....(I
thought)

I discovered a copy of Ghost 9 floating around, installed it, ghosted what
is there in the NTFS area, and was going to again try Gparted to attempt to
do what I failed at before.

Well, I tried two versions of CD based Gparted, one of them on the
driverescuecd, and the other on something called the Gparted LiveCD. They
both booted the machine, and neither of them recognized either of the
partitions on the hard drive. The one from the driverescuecd sure saw the
partitions that were on the hard drive before.

In other words, there's something about the HP rescue reinstallation that
makes the machine different from the way it was when it came from the store.
Both builds of Gparted recognized the drive, but claimed it had something
like 185 Gig of unallocated space and nothing else.

So the question is for people who know about these HP Hard drive based
reinstallations of XP. What is different between my now "restored" computer
(and it behaves just like new, boots xp, exhibits an NTFS and a FAT32
partition, as expected) and the way it was when it came from the store? The
other question of course is whether whatever changed can be
restored...without having a copy of what was there before.

Again, as always, thanks.
 
exray said:
On the 4th, I posted my confusing tale about how I'd trashed my store
bought computer hard drive, attempting to shrink the NTFS XP partition it
came with from 170 gig to something smaller, planning to essentially make
it appear like my old computer.

I had a disk error, it wouldn't boot, so I finally hit F10, got into the
recovery part of the drive -- the FAT32 part that HP stores its complete
XP installation on, and restored it to its "new from the store"
condition....(I thought)

I discovered a copy of Ghost 9 floating around, installed it, ghosted what
is there in the NTFS area, and was going to again try Gparted to attempt
to do what I failed at before.

Well, I tried two versions of CD based Gparted, one of them on the
driverescuecd, and the other on something called the Gparted LiveCD. They
both booted the machine, and neither of them recognized either of the
partitions on the hard drive. The one from the driverescuecd sure saw the
partitions that were on the hard drive before.

In other words, there's something about the HP rescue reinstallation that
makes the machine different from the way it was when it came from the
store. Both builds of Gparted recognized the drive, but claimed it had
something like 185 Gig of unallocated space and nothing else.

So the question is for people who know about these HP Hard drive based
reinstallations of XP. What is different between my now "restored"
computer (and it behaves just like new, boots xp, exhibits an NTFS and a
FAT32 partition, as expected) and the way it was when it came from the
store? The other question of course is whether whatever changed can be
restored...without having a copy of what was there before.

Again, as always, thanks.
Click to expand...

I don't have a conclusive answer for you and I'm no expert, but have you
considered trying another disk management app like Acronis Disk Director
before deciding that there's something wrong with your restored image? It's
cheap (ish) and it's worked fine whenever I've used it.

Regards,
Keith.
 
Thanks Keith,

I may have misstated my "condition". To simplify: I bought a computer with
XP on it (and the capability of reinstalling XP on a separate partiton on
the same big HD). The new computer worked fine, but I didn't want a 170 gig
partition, I wanted some smaller ones.

So I plunked a linux based thing called driverescuecd into the CD drive and
booted it, ran gparted from the linux environment, thought I'd succeeded in
shrinking the native NTFS partition on the hard drive.

When I went to reboot into windows, I got the message a disk read error
occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart, which means I'd hosed something on the HD.
So I invoked the reinstall feature built into the computer, reinstalled XP,
and everything is fine, almost.

I then used ghost and have now saved an image of the hard drive to use if I
screw up the HD again.

When I put the linux CD in there again (maybe that's a crazy thing to do,
but I tried doing it), unlike the first time I did it -- when that program
gparted recognized that the hard drive had a very large NTFS partition, a
decent sized FAT32 partition, and a small amount of unallocated space --
this time gparted didn't see any partitions on the hard drive, just a ton of
unallocated space.

What that means to me is that gparted did something the first time that the
windows reinstall managed to overcome, but didn't exactly restore the
machine to its pristine condition. I'm wondering what changes it made, and
I'm wondering if there are any linux gurus out there who might know.

There's a gentleman named Svend Olaf Mikkelsen out there who has written
some superb software for expert use on partitions. I've downloaded it, have
run it, and now am trying to understand how the disk is organized. It ain't
easy.

Sorry if what I wrote was needlessly confusing.
 
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