Hey there,

Once again my brother inlaws PC is in need of assistance. This time hes been having trouble with his HDD. Its a 320GB Seagate Barracuder OEM. He reported his OS Vista slowing and not running multiple programs at the same time, then when it did it would freeze one, also opening IE would just crash the system.

So I decided to guide him over the phone into another fresh reinstall. IT had been reformatted a few weeks prior to remove partitions from it and start clean.

So we started over, and upon reloading XP (vista is the upgrade afterwards) it came to create partitions or delete and start over. On telling him to delete the main 320GB partition/space (well 280GB is what he actually ended up with) he said he could see 2 partitions. One was 140GB and the other was 133GB, one had the Drive letter C: 0 and the other was set at C: 1.

We managed to delete the first one but it will not let him delete the second, he cant highlight it.

So my questions are. How did a 320GB fully formatted with no partitions and OS installed HDD become 2 seperate ones which wont let him go back to a full sized one?

A friend said that larger drives are buffered into 2 pieces of equal size so it could have failed and is reading the drive as 2 and not one whole, is this true?

I'll assume its a HDD failure and he'll need a new one for now.

Well first thing that comes to mind is that he's using an older version of xp.... I don't remember if it was sp1 or sp2 that allowed you to see/format large drives properly... Also you can try using vista to do all of it without first installing xp... you just have to put the xp cd in to prove you have something to upgrade from ( not positive about this as I haven't done this with vista but I have with other version of windows )

Yeah installing XP without loading SP2 will not let you 'see' the other part of the HDD, you need to install Service Pack 2 (SP2) to see the other partition. Then you can merge them both together and end up with one. Unless you'd like two. Which in my opinion is a better option because you can load your operating system on one drive, and music, games etc onto another

Interesting, but SP2 is already on the XP Home Edition disk as its included on the newer versions. But my point again is that the drive was one singular drive and has now been split into 2 without any interference, along with programs crashing because of it, and we cannot turn the drive back into one whole one again.

I'll try your ideas though just incase.

*EDIT*

Turns out you were right, he was using an older copy of an XP disk without SP1. Once we used my more up to date version the problem stopped and I was able to delete the partition and get back the full amount. His 2nd drive had been wiped though so that was the only downside.

Problem solved. Thanks

This post has been edited by JohnnyHolic666: Mar 21 2008, 08:04 PM