Lost partition

I have really screwed up my 160 gig Maxtor HDD. I decided to fdisk it and have two partitions, 33 gig and 120 gig, for a dual boot system. That worked ok. Then decided to go back to a single partition - that is when the problems started. Now all I have is a 33 gig drive and cannot get the rest to show up. Even the BIOS list it as 33 gig which it used to list correctly. I ran fdisk and it only shows a 33 gig drive. I tried debug to clear the partition table and still only have 33 gig. I cannot find the numbers needed to manually set the drive in the BIOS (cylinders, sectors, etc) and must use the autodetect, which detects it as a 33 gig drive! It is a Maxtor 6L160PO. Any ideas would be appreciated. John

 

Run the Maxtor HD diag on it if you can. It may be a defective drive.

 

When using fdisk, did you remove both the secondary and primary partitions, reboot, and rebuild them?

If you are using xp, you can boot to the disk, and then choose to delete all partitions and then rebuild them.

Maybe this help...

 

Thanks for the ideas. I have ran Maxtor's diag program and it is ok. I am using this disk as a second disk and not real sure if I run the XP cd it will let me partition a second disk. I might try that after putting it in the computer as the master. It seems the main problem, for whatever reason, when I deleted the large 2nd partition, the BIOS picked up on that and now only sees the 32 gig partition as the whole hard drive. I can do whatever I want with the drive but the whole system treats it as 32/33 gig drive. If anyone has a Maxtor 6L160PO drive, maybe you could give me the BIOS numbers for the drive so I can try to set it up manualy (all the numbers that the BIOS list for the drive (sectors, memory, platters, etc). I don't know if that would even work but worth a try. The "auto detect" mode in the BIOS sure doesn't find it correct. It does detect the correct model number. I don't know where these numbers are stored that the BIOS reads about the drive on boot. Thanks again. John

 

Now I'm curious. Could you tell us exactly what you did to take it back to a single partition?

Actually, I don't think it is. Maxtor doesn't recognise that model number. But it does recognise "6L160P0". The correct model number might make it easier to find the information you need with Google. Unfortunately, Maxtor's support pages weren't very helpful, but you'll find them here.

 

Thanks for the Model Number correction Rob. Mixed the #0 and Letter O. I found the numbers I want to try. It started with fdisk to split the original partition into a 33&120. That worked, BUT I used an older version of MS DOS to do this, 6.0. I then formated both. When I checked the partitions, using the disk management in XP, I had the two partitions but showed them as FAT16! How this happened I don't know but right then I knew FAT16 would not support a large drive. In my "smarter then God mode" I decided to just delete the large partition and resize the smaller partition along with formating in FAT32. It deleted the 120 gig partition which has been gone eversince. That is all the BIOS sees (with auto detect), along with fdisk. I will try to manualy set the specs in the BIOS and see what happens. I did find that it is under warrenty so may just send it back. Thanks for the input and will report back on the BIOS change. John

 

I tried to manually set the specs in the BIOS and that did not work. I give up. I sent it back today (although I really did learn a lot trying to figure it out). Thanks for the help here and ideas to try. John

 

It's a mystery.

I can see why FDISK didn't work -- if I recall correctly, that version didn't know about FAT32 and what later versions of FDISK call "large disk support". Without that, you get a FAT16 partition, which is limited to 2.1GB. I expect that the result was a messed-up partition table.

I wonder what would have happened if you had used a version of FDISK from Win95B or later, knocked down all partitions, and started from scratch with large-disk support enabled. I guess we'll never know.

What I don't understand is why your BIOS stopped recognising the full capacity of the drive, even unformatted. The BIOS interrogates the drive during the POST for that info, long before any operating system loads. Maybe someone else can answer that one.

 

Rob, I wondered that all along. I didn't know where the BIOS looks to find the size of the drive. I even tried it in another computer which also identified the drive as 32 gig which it also had seen as 160 gig before. The FAT16 partitioning screw up, somehow, changed whatever the POST looks at. Both still identified the drive by correct name and model number. I did try to use fdisk from xp but, by then, it only allowed me to partition a 32 gig drive! It seems the second (larger) partition I had made originally, and then deleted, was never recoved or seen by the BIOS. Of course when I was allowed to delete this large partition both showed up with the fdisk. I might take an old 20 gig drive and dupicate this screw up, which being that "small" it may not. Interesting problem and may be way to deep for me to figure out what really happened. It just does not seem likely the drive went "bad" because of this. Thanks, John confused