WesternDigital 250G system files

[Guest]

I've got a 200G Western Digital hard drive on a Promise controller
card. I installed the drivers, enabled big drive support, loaded
win2k, etc. Been using it for six months. Works fine.

I'm trying to add a 250G Western Digital hard drive to the card on the
second controller channel.

Installed and booted up, Windows picked up the drive fine, and I did
the signature, partition and format in the computer
management/storage/disk management section of win2k-svpk3.

When I started using it, the win2k defragmenter program started giving
me weirdness. when it analyzes a logical drive, it gives the usual
graphical display and shows the "green system files" taking up half
the graphical display.

On my 200G drive, the green system files take up much less of the
graphical display and there's always a small green system file in the
middle of the graphical display surrounded by white space.

On the 250G drive the green system files take up all the space up to
the mid point where the small file usually is.


At first I thought it was normal, but I started getting
defragmentation messages that the defragmenter didn't have enough
space as much of the disk was "unavailable" to the defragmenter
program. e.g. "50% of the disk was free but only 17% was available
to the defragmenter program".

I suspect the partitioning and formating didn't go right. Any ideas ?

I'm wondering if I have to disconnect all the drives and use the new
250 gigger to "reinstall" win2k in order to load the drivers and
partition from the win2k cdrom install and then bail out of the
install and reconnect the other drive.

win2k service pk 3
bx chipset
promise 100tx2 controller
card and drives from WD

 

[Guest]

Well, I removed the old partitions created in win2k disk management,
then booted the computer to Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Tools
floppy and used it to partition and format the 250G drive on the
second Promise controller card channel.

I rebooted the system to win2k running on the 200G drive and took a
look at the new partitions/logical drives on the 250G drive with the
win2k defragmenter program.

The green system files representation are now consistent with the 200G
drive: Smaller amount of green system files at start of drives, and a
small green system file in the center of the drive display space.

sweet

Still wondering why win2k didn't partition and format correctly.
Maybe that's only for smaller drives. I would have thought that once
you get the drivers for the controller card in place and enable big
drive support in win2k, it would work.

PS I was using this drive for a week or two before I figured out it
was messed up. I was only about 10 gigs into it, so I backed out slow
and went through this re-partition exercise. Kinda scary in
retrospect.