Filling up a hard drive?

mr_urza Posted messages 586 Status Membre -  
mr_urza Posted messages 586 Status Membre -
Hey there :) It's an old problem that I gave up on and now I'm bringing it back to light..
One day, a hard drive (WD 20GB) just stopped working... I couldn't boot from it anymore...
So I decided to format it...
During the reinstall, it crashed after the fdisk... I told myself to forget about installing it on another hard drive, just focus on your system and keep that 20GB for data storage...
We could see my 20GB in the BIOS but not under Windows, except in one place... in the device manager where it appeared, and the only thing I could do was "populate my hard drive..." what does that mean?
Also, is there any chance someday I could get it to work again?
Thanks to all :)

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7 réponses

yves-marie
 
Hello,
it's the first time I've seen such a message but with Windows, it's not surprising. :-)
What you can always do if your hard drive is not working properly from Windows is to reformat it from the BIOS before then using FDISK and FORMAT.
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mr_urza Posted messages 586 Status Membre 28
 
reformat from the BIOS ??!!!
you mean a low-level formatting?

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batmat Posted messages 1880 Registration date   Status Membre 114
 
With a record that really looks grumpy, it is indeed a solution to consider.

@++
Post, post again and always :-)
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batmat Posted messages 1880 Registration date   Status Membre 114
 
With a record that's really sulking, it's indeed a solution to consider.

@++
Post, post again and always :-)
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mr_urza Posted messages 586 Status Membre 28
 
it's under Win XP Pro
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wAx Posted messages 1596 Registration date   Status Membre Last intervention   202
 
your disk that wants to be populated (come on!), wouldn't it be a dynamic volume type by any chance?
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mr_urza Posted messages 586 Status Membre 28
 
What's that volume dynamic?
Does it change its IP by itself lol?

Could it be the cause of my misfortunes and the purchase of my 3 other HDDs?!!

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wAx Posted messages 1596 Registration date   Status Membre Last intervention   202
 
On Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, you can convert disks to dynamic.

In dynamic mode, you no longer have to deal with partitions, FAT, NTFS, in short, none of the things you know.

You have a large space in which you define volumes, but you can, somewhat like with Partition Magic, resize and make lots of modifications under Windows.

If you have multiple hard drives, you can extend a volume across several disks, like RAID.

That's the nice side. The dark side is that it's managed by Windows; Fdisk and Partition Magic are unable to read the way all this mess is written on the disk.

If you have a multiboot Linux setup, for example, I won't even mention the panic. In short, I almost lost 20GB of data when converting to dynamic (by the way, it's an irreversible operation), just to see what it does.
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mr_urza Posted messages 586 Status Membre 28
 
Okay, thanks wAx :)

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