[Kylestern]

Greetings, i'm not sure if this is a hard drive, motherboard, or XP problem but will post it here since its the hard drives playing up.

OK heres the problem..installed brand new XP SP2 oem on a new 80gb sata hard drive..Set up with two partitions..20gb for windows and 60gb for all other programs.. simple i hear you say thats what i thought but after installing all the updates and pccillin after a few hours the hard drive auto partitioned the free 60gb space and made it void space apart from 8gb where all the other programs where installed..unfortunatley the 8gb is now registering as unformated space and when i try to access it Windows asks if i whant to format!!

Help please...is this a virus? xp flaw? hardrive problem? or motherboard flaw?

if any other info is needed just ask.

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Hi Kylestern

Apologies for the delay in dealing with your topic. Are you still having problems?

[Samm]

Hi Kylestern

Apologies for the delay in dealing with your topic. Are you still having problems?

[Kylestern]

yeah wouldnt have a clue whats doing it either....it only seems to be happening to secondary hard drives.

[Samm]

What do you mean 'the secondary hard drives'? Do you have two drives in the machine or are you referring to the secondary partition on the first drive?

Any chance you could go into Disk Management & do a screen shot so we can see whats going on please?

[Kylestern]

Ok, it seems to be happening to every drive other than the Primary partition of c:

heres the screen shot as you can see its partitioned the secondary partition. and now both partition are asking to be formatted. I fear it to be a virus yet it hasnt touched the main partition where windows is.
man am i stumped on this one. also do you think there is a chance i will be able to recover any of the files lost?

Is there an easy solution for this? or should i consider paying a pro to fix?

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[Samm]

I can see what you mean, you do indeed appear to have two unformatted partitions. Whats especially weird though, is that only one of them is inside the extended partition. The other appears to be outside of it (ie like a second primary partition but at the end of the drive).

As to whats caused this, I have no idea. I suggest that if you haven't already done so, you update your virus scanner & run a thorough check over the C drive.

As for data recovery, you could try running a program such as DIY's iRecover utility :
http://www.diydatare...nl/irecover.htm

You can download the trial version & test it out. The trial version allows you to recover one folder per session. If it appears to work, then you can register it & use it to recover all the data.

[Kylestern]

cool...thanks for the help i'll try and recover what i can and then format it all again lucky its a new hardrive and not much was on it.

[Samm]

Let us know how you get on