Partitioning Error

[Josh]

Here's a good one. I had a virus on my computer that messed up everything. So I decided the best course of action would be to reinstall windows. Good idea right! I backed up all my important files onto a cd. I know the virus could be on the cd's so I'm taking extra precautions. I have one hard drive (40Gb) split into two partitions. A primary partition for a windows OS, and an extended for all the crap that piles up. I did that so if windows stopped working I could delete windows and reinstall it. I reformated C: and reinstalled windows for that time. I did that once when windows had a lot of fatal messages when turning on my computer. When doing that C: stayed C: and D: changed to F:. I tried formating C: a second time. That didnt work out so good with the virus problem. I tried to repartition my drives and I delete the extended but it said i didnt have one. Then I tried to make an extended partition and it said i had one already. The only thing that I can come up with is that I reinstalled windows once before and it changed my one partition from D: to F:. I didnt think anything about why it changed the letter. Can anyone help me

 

[ekÆsine]

please list your operating system and file systems you have on your hard disk. and what are you using to partition and format? what is showing up as drive D now?

if using winXP you can use the management console to set up drive letters. if using 9.x you should realize that fdisk assigns drive letters in the order that the device was installed. dos reconizes the drive letters as you see it in fdisk with the exception that it does not assign letters to non-dos partitions since it cannot access them.

for win 9.x the only way to get the drive letters back the way you want is to remove all zip, cd-rom, ect and leave only the hard disk and remake all partitions. the order you create the partitions is the same order in which dos/fdisk reconizes them. so consequently win3.x, win95/98 see them that way too

if you only had formated instead of deleting a partition the drive letters would have remained intact. win2000 and winxp let you change drive letters despite what dos reconizes them as. scan your cd's for viruses otherwise they can infect data on your hard disk. hope that helps

 

[Josh]

Windows XP.

A: is my Floppy Drive
C: is my Primary Partition
D: is my CD burner
E: is my DVD Rom
F: is my Extended Partition

I'm using my boot disk from windows 98 to format and fdisk from that bootup disk.

 

[ekÆsine]

yup, management console is your solution. find administrative tools>> computer management>> storage>> disk management. change your cd-rom and disk drive letters around

for your information it is not called "expansion partition" it is a extended partition with logical drives contained inside.

josh next time don't use win98 boot disk to partition and format. just boot off the windows xp CD, assumming you have that disc unless it is pre-installed on your computer and all you have is a restore CD. in that case use the restore CD instead of partitioning it yourself.

your computer probably uses NTFS since it has winXP. dos can only detect that it is not a valid fat file system and thats about all. the only way you can use that boot disk is if your winXP used a FAT file system.