• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Lost in HDD Hell

B

Brewsir

n00b
Joined
Jul 13, 2003
Messages
16
Rather than going through the whole story, I've been having major troubles getting my PC to continue to boot. It will boot into windows for awhile, and then, not. After initially thinking my problem lied elsewhere, I decided to get some partitioning software and view my disks through it. My disks were all chopped up, and it wasn't my doing. I have 2 1 TB drives and 1 300G. They all had several unallocated partitions of anywhere between 1 and 8 gigs. Using Mini Tool Partition Wizard, I was able to clean them all up, and get them whole again. Except 1, the disk Win7 is on has a 1GB partition on it, in which my bootmgr, bootsect.bak files are, as well as Boot and System Volume Information folders. They do not also reside on the on the larger partition on the same disk. I've never seen this, so I'm thinking it's not the norm, and that this is whats causing the eventual boot failure. I've already reinstalled windows 3 times in the last couple of days, so, I'm hoping not to have to do that again. Can it be as simple as copying these files over to the main partition, and then deleting and merging the 2? I wanted to get some feedback before trying it, so I don't have another winstall to go through. TIA
 
Brewsir,

The 1gig partition with the boot files is normal for windows 7. If you delete this partition, your windows will not boot up. After you reinstall, the 1 gig partition will be back.

It is possible to merge the two if you know what you are doing and your main partition is smaller then 2Tb. Personally, I would not mess with it.
 
Brewsir said:
Rather than going through the whole story, I've been having major troubles getting my PC to continue to boot. It will boot into windows for awhile, and then, not.
Click to expand...
When you say it stops booting into Windows, how does it manifest itself? Just sit with a flashing cursor after the post? Failure to find bootloader, etc? Some other error? Gets to the Win logo and freezes?

After initially thinking my problem lied elsewhere, I decided to get some partitioning software and view my disks through it. My disks were all chopped up, and it wasn't my doing. I have 2 1 TB drives and 1 300G. They all had several unallocated partitions of anywhere between 1 and 8 gigs.
Click to expand...
Did this suddenly occur one day (meaning you knew it wasn't previously that way and suddenly it was?

Using Mini Tool Partition Wizard, I was able to clean them all up, and get them whole again. Except 1, the disk Win7 is on has a 1GB partition on it, in which my bootmgr, bootsect.bak files are, as well as Boot and System Volume Information folders. They do not also reside on the on the larger partition on the same disk. I've never seen this, so I'm thinking it's not the norm, and that this is whats causing the eventual boot failure. I've already reinstalled windows 3 times in the last couple of days, so, I'm hoping not to have to do that again. Can it be as simple as copying these files over to the main partition, and then deleting and merging the 2? I wanted to get some feedback before trying it, so I don't have another winstall to go through. TIA
Click to expand...

Windows 7 will by default create an additional partition of anywhere from 40-120MB (Named System Reserved) which will have the bootmgr and bootsect files and boot and bootwiz folders. This is normal. Disk Management from MS shouldn't allow you to delete this, but many third party partition (and the diskpart.exe util from MS will) utilities will. If you do decide to remove the partition, running startup repair will fix the lack-of-booting you will notice after your next restart.

If this is a computer that you bought as a system (meaning you didn't build it yourself) from someone like HP or Dell (or others), there will also often be additional partition(s) of from 1-8GB each which are usually hidden to the OS which will include disaster recovery files like the OS installer directory and/or the ISO files you can burn your own recovery disks from, or even a ghost-type image file where you can just lay down a fresh copy of the factory-installed OS and completely overwrite your OS.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top