Healthy (Unknown Partition) in Windows XP

[killians45]

exactly how did he convert it? hopefully wasn' t through a dos shell.

 

[killians45]

oh man, wait.... how big is this HDD???? its got 18.2GB of info, but what is the HD size....

 

[TheMajor]

oh man, wait.... how big is this HDD???? its got 18.2GB of info, but what is the HD size....

good point! he prolly needs to flash his BIOS

 

[killians45]

that, and a very important thing to consider. He may need to try and see if he can somehow make it a dynamic disk in management. Remember the limitations on a fat32, and now the old limitations of winxp and ntfs problems (until sp1??). With both those combined, he may need to turn it into dynamic mode.

 

[TheMajor]

wtf is dynamic mode?

BTW, his ide controller should still support the drive unless its not the same he used with 98, I mean...his mobo might be too old to support the drive because it had 98.

 

[killians45]

dynamic mode allows you to take, say, 2 individual drives and say for example you had one drive E: with 3 GB left on it, you can put it into dynamic mode and span that to drive D: increasing drive D: by 3GB. However, I THINK that may not be possible on the primary partition. I'll have to look into it. Anyhow, what I was saying is that depending on size, he converted to NTFS, has a FAT32 second drive, updated to XP(if I remember right, have to reread this post) and now it doesn't recognize it. Could be because of the size of the drive and the FAT32 limitations in XP for FAT32 partitions which was corrected in SP1 but again, I'm not sure if this applies to a secondary drive or not. Have to research it.

 

[killians45]

wait, scratch that. dont think you can put a fat32 drive in dynamic mode.

 

[TheMajor]

u can ( i think) i went in diskmanagement and the option is available, but it only does disk0+disk1, not partitions..too bad

I assume dynamic drive is only an OS feature right? not HD/bootsector/IDE controller or anything else related right?

 

[killians45]

yep, just an os feature... I did some checking and with HD larger than 20gig there is a problem with the LBA, so update to at least SP1.

 

[TheMajor]

yup, sp1a should fix it, even if his BIOS does not select LBA mode automatically XPsp1a will still be able to detect it