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.