[Tyler5690]

I have two NTFS partitions on my hard drive. I wanted to combine them to increase my usable space, but I ran into a problem. PartitionMagic says the hard disk is bad. Windows disk manager finds no problems, and I have run Chkdsk several times. Acrons Disk Director shows the partitions as good, but fails when it tries to combine or resize the partitions. Gparted shows the disk as unformatted. I have also run the tools from my hard disk manufacturer, and it finds no problems with the drive (physically).

Is there any way I can fix these problems, be they with the file system or the partition?

Thanks for any help.

TT

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That's an interesting problem for which I have no answer. My feeling is that there is something wrong with the disk. The fact that three resizing programs failed cannot be ignored.

It could be that one or more of the partitions are so full that resizing cannot take place. Alternatively the data may be so fragmented that it occupies part of the space that you want to move from one partition to the other. Please run defrag and try again. Check how full the partitions are.

Do you have any problems running this disk? It may be that the problem is where the partitions are registered but then I would expect problems running windows too.

Just some ideas.

[The Skeptic]

That's an interesting problem for which I have no answer. My feeling is that there is something wrong with the disk. The fact that three resizing programs failed cannot be ignored.

It could be that one or more of the partitions are so full that resizing cannot take place. Alternatively the data may be so fragmented that it occupies part of the space that you want to move from one partition to the other. Please run defrag and try again. Check how full the partitions are.

Do you have any problems running this disk? It may be that the problem is where the partitions are registered but then I would expect problems running windows too.

Just some ideas.

[Tyler5690]

I ran a utility from the Ultimate Boot CD, I can't remember which, but it said something about the sectors for the first partition overlapping with the second partition. Windows doesn't seem to have any problems at all. I discovered there was a problem when I tried to install Ubuntu using WUBI and it failed to install properly.

Partition 1 is 30 GB with 8 free, Partition 2 is 45 GB with 30 free. When I tried to combine the partitions, all the data from Partition 2 was on an external drive, so there shouldn't have been an insufficient space problem.

Thanks for your help!

TT

[The Skeptic]

I have never seen this problem. I reached, logically, the same conclusion that UBCD indicate to. I wonder how windows works with this apparent problem. You can format the disk and recreate the partitions but that's what you want to avoid, isn't it?

[Tyler5690]

Yes, if possible, I would like to fix the disk without a reformat, if this is possible. Is there any way to redefine the partitions or something non-destructively?

[The Skeptic]

The data concerning the disk partitions is in the Master Boot Record (MBR). The only thing that I can think off is to run fixmbr command from recovery console.

Please note: if you plan to do so backup up all your important data on another storage device. This is imperative because quite often it happens that the repair fail and all data can be lost.