HD Partition's Problem

[zillah]

I have got problem with the my laptop (Dell Latitude D600) HD's partition (I am not sure if it is with partition, but I guess), I have experienced similar(not same)problem long time ago for more that one time with my desktop PC(not the laptop), especially when I installed more than one operating system on the same HD, but I had no clue what was going on, I used to re-partition or format the HD.

For instance the problem that I had experienced before, when I was trying to use Partition Magic (V8) to verify the there was no error on a specific partition, it was always telling me that there was error (As far as I remember it was error #119 but not sure, because I have not recorded it at that time). I have been told that there was bug in PM, do not rely on it

Today when I tried to defragment volume C (windows partition NTFS ) for my laptop(which has 3 OS on it Windows 2000 server , Linux, Solaris V10), I faced this error message:

"The volume WIN2000 (C : ) has 16 KB per cluster. Disk Defragmenter cannot defragment NTFS drives with more than 4 KB per cluster".

1- Are these type of errors because I have more than one OSs on the same HD ?

2- Can I repair my current error ? How ?

3- What should I use to verify that there is no error on the all partitions on the HD ?

 

[Elbatrop1]

I think this might be caused by the partition being too small. I know that cluster size varies with partition size, but I cant remember the exact relationship.

 

[Alvin.C]

Re:

Hello,

Very simply, your C volume has been partitioned with 16KB per cluster. In order for the Disk Degragmenter to successfully defrag the partition, it requires each cluster to be a maximum of 4KB in size only.

So it's not because you've installed more than one OS on one Hard Drive, but because of cluster size. It's perfectly fine to create multiple partitions on one Hard Drive, and install an OS on each partition- it shouldn't cause problems.

To rectify this issue, go into PartitionMagic, right click on your C: drive, then once the drop-down menu appears go to Advanced > Resize Clusters. Set the cluster size to 4K, click ok...then apply. PartitionMagic will resize all 16K clusters on the drive to 4K...simple.

It won't erase or damage the C partition, any other partitions or your Hard Drive whatsoever. Following a cluster resize, you should be able to do a defrag. It may take a while though, depending on the amount of data your have on that specific partition.

 

[zillah]

then apply. PartitionMagic will resize all 16K clusters on the drive to 4K...simple.

I can not install PM on windows 2000 Server, I am receiving this error message:

" The setup has detected that you are running Windows NT/2000/.NET Server. The install will now exit"

What should I do in this case ?

Could you please look at this also:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;837336

 

[Alvin.C]

Re:

Hello,

Do you have any other Windows operating systems you can install PartitionMagic on?

Microsoft's soultion to this issue is to format the drive in NTFS format again, but enforcing an allocation unit size of less then or equal to 4096 bytes, or 4 Kilobytes. An allocation unit size is the same as cluster size.

PartitionMagic allows you to change the cluster size, without having to format and lose data.

 

[zillah]

Do you have any other Windows operating systems you can install PartitionMagic on?

No I have got only one. And also I tried to boot from CD which contains many utilities, one of these utilities are Partition Magic V8, it was not able to read the partitons on the hard disk

 

[Alvin.C]

Re:

Hello,

Unfortunately, i'm not familiar with any other program which can convert a partition's cluster size from one to another...apart from PartitionMagic.

The only other way I can think of is to do what the Microsoft Support Knowledge Base Article instructed...to reformat the partition enforcing a 4Kb allocation unit size / cluster size. This means you'll have to backup all your data on the C: partition, and transfer it back once your've successfully formatted the drive.