View Full Version : the mystery of the disappering 10gigger
krakerman
11-21-01, 04:03 PM
ok, i have a friend who has prob with his hard drive. first off, he doesnt seem very computer oriented as far as hardware goes, and i havent actually seen the computer so i have to go by what he says. somehow, he had a 20gb and 10gb drive running in windows 98 and had win98 recognize them as a single 30gb drive. is this even possible? anyways, he updated to winME (god knows why) and now the computer will only recognize the 20gb drive, so the 10gb has effectively disappeared. i asked him if anyone messed with the hard drives during installation, and the answer was no. apprently the problem was caused by the installation of me. i know this isnt much info, but if anyone has any ideas on what cn cause this could you please tell me? ill try to get any more info you need also. thanks
... I don't think thats possible to have a 20+10 gig to link so it can be viewed as 30gig.
Anyways.. Tell the bios to boot up detecting the IDE devices and see if it detects the two hdd..
If it does it seems like the Windows ME installation has gone some what wrong and I would recommend a format.
Forgot to add a FORMAT THAT INSTALLS WIN 98 not ME, or Win 2K over 98 if he has it.
Windows 2000 supports something called volume spanning- it can stretch a single drive letter across 4 drives, if you want. Make all 4 show up as one big one. But, Win9X and ME don't support this at all I believe.
Personally, I'd check the wiring for the 10gigger- if a plug came loose, on it, POOF no more drive. Check to be sure both power and the ATA cable are securely fastened.
Aside from that, Like Yodums said, set the BIOS to AUTO for all 4 hard drive channels, that way it will detect what is plugged in there.
Christoph
11-21-01, 11:04 PM
Also tell him to set the jumpers to cable select, if he can figure out how to do that. It makes playing with the IDE cable soooo much easier.
Über~PhLuBB
11-22-01, 02:16 AM
That sounds like he split a 30GB drive in to 2 partitions, one 20 gig, one 10 gig. Apparently, when he installed ME, it merged the two back together.
That sounds like he split a 30GB drive in to 2 partitions, one 20 gig, one 10 gig. Apparently, when he installed ME, it merged the two back together.
or could even be that he was using some form of disk compression with win98 and Me doesnt support it or has formatted the compressed drive http://koti.mbnet.fi/antiqser/smilies/teleport.gif
Sounds like he had a RAID array set up. that would make windows see both drives at one as one drive and give you more speed. You have to format them right and the set them up in widows or they won't work together.
LiquidPenguin
11-23-01, 03:55 PM
You know, if he did partition a 30GB drive into 20 and 10 that would explain why ME is seeing only a 20GB. I did a partition once a long time ago and during a flaked install the FORMAT would only deal with the primary partition and not the entire drive. For some reason the drive behaves as whatever the primary partition is set at and I lost the table for the secondary partition. If that is the case he would have to run FDISK (Or something similar) to rebuild the table. But in the original post he does say that he is using two drives and not one. But he also does say that his friend is not exactly computer savy. Whatever, we're all going to speculate without actually looking at the PC.
Christoph
11-23-01, 03:58 PM
Originally posted by LiquidPenguin
You know, if he did partition a 30GB drive into 20 and 10 that would explain why ME is seeing only a 20GB. I did a partition once a long time ago and during a flaked install the FORMAT would only deal with the primary partition and not the entire drive. For some reason the drive behaves as whatever the primary partition is set at and I lost the table for the secondary partition. If that is the case he would have to run FDISK (Or something similar) to rebuild the table. But in the original post he does say that he is using two drives and not one. But he also does say that his friend is not exactly computer savy. Whatever, we're all going to speculate without actually looking at the PC.
He has the opposite problem. He's got two HDs that he wants to act like one, not one that he wants to act like two.
LiquidPenguin
11-23-01, 04:12 PM
Originally posted by IdeaMagnate
He has the opposite problem. He's got two HDs that he wants to act like one, not one that he wants to act like two.
That's kind of my point though. If his friend isn't computer savy it isn't too difficult to confuse him with a drive is partitioned to appear like two drives. Or one that is using compression or whatever. Maybe he was using a 3rd party software to "join" the two drives into one that isn't installed under ME. Or he had a RAID(can't be) configuration. There's quite a few reasons that Windows won't see a drive. Flaked tables, Unusual drive format (I have a drive that is dedicated to Linux and Windows won't even recognize it at all, a quirky issue in and of itself) etc. etc. I was presenting a possibility. However, now that i think about it, if he was using software to "join" the drives then it might be that Windows can't see the 2nd drive because of an unusual format the software used.
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