Hard drive is suddenly unpartitioned

jpmkm

That Ain't Mayo On My Lip...
Joined
Oct 30, 2001
Messages
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Okay, first of all, I'm at school 150 miles away from home. So my mom's computer has been giving them trouble lately. Sometimes it will just shut itself off. I haven't had a chance to look at it so I don't know why it is doing that. Anyway, a couple days ago it shut itself off and now it won't boot. I walked my dad through as much stuff as I could tell him over the phone and we didn't get anywhere. On boot it displays an "insert system disk" message. The bios recognizes the hard drive. Windows 2000 setup recognizes the hard drive, but says the entire drive is unpartitioned space. Therefore, the windows recovery(automatic, manual, console) won't recognize any windows installations. Does anyone have any idea what could have caused this or what I can do? I happen to be going home this weekend for a wedding, so I'm going to mess around with knoppix and the UBCD and see if I can do anything, but I'm not about to try to walk my dad through those things over the phone(hell, I had to tell my dad several times why partitioning the drive wouldn't bring the data back). I'm confident the data is still intact, but I have no idea how to access it. It's okay if I have to wait until the weekend to fix it, but if there is an easy fix I can walk my dad through over the phone that would be nice. I hate doing phone support. :mad:
 
This is odd. He must of got some nasty virus because partitions don't delete themselves. If it says "Unpartitoned Space," I think he has to put a gravestone on all of his data and Win2000. Before putting a new OS on, I would look at the hard drive. The hard drive may be ****ed up and it will keep doing this to him again and again. What other stuff was happening to the PC?
 
I'm curious about this myself I have a similar problem with my XP machine (see my other posts). So far I haven't been able to fix the actual problem, only recover the data off of it (somewhat). I'll keep an eye on this thread, and let you know if I find anything that fixes the drive.
 
Could it be a virus? I haven't seen one that messes with the partition table in a long time. I do believe he was running AVG but something could have slipped past it. He says they haven't done anything out of the ordinary. I think he said every time the computer has shut off they had been using internet explorer. I don't see any relation there though.
 
I've seen a hardware issue cause it. One customer that I had added a DVD drive to his machine with the jumpers in the wrong place, and it hosed his partitions so bad that I couldn't recover anything. Finally, I reformatted the hard drive. I think his mistake screwed up the IDE controller driver somehow which in turn screwed up his hard drive format. Could a piece of hardware be going out? It is odd.
 
:D FIXED :D My system registry hive was corrupt. Followed directions in this faq. I don't know if our problems are related, but i hope this somehow helps.
 
kurgan said:
:D FIXED :D My system registry hive was corrupt. Followed directions in this faq. I don't know if our problems are related, but i hope this somehow helps.
I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, it appears that I can't even access anything on the hard drive.

I did consider a hardware fault, and I will check that out when I go home. I just don't know what could have caused it, though.
 
How old is the hard drive they were using? I'm thinking that it went bad and I wouldn't trust it again.
 
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