loninappleton

Fdisk is not cooperating with repartitioning a Seagate hard drive.

I know all data will be lost.


I want to be able to clone other 120Gb hard drives I have back and forth as
necessary. This means that the 160 has to be partioned down to 120Gb
in the main partition.

I have seen some guides such as the Radified Fdsik guide. It looks well-written
but I'm getting errors on the Windows ME version.


I've been practicing on an NTFS 15G drive before tacklling the big one.

I've had a problem using the percentage or mb size paramaters. The
fdisk just says there are partitions already made etc etc and I cannot do
anything to partition.

What's my problem?

I don't care if I have to reformat but I have to know where to
start without being frustrated by a lot of error code.

For instance: Using the floppy I have with fdisk, I cannot go down to
a directoy of drive C: the drive is not found. I don't know what the
deal is.


I've seen one system that works well in the Linux world. You just use
a slider to adjust partition size in QTParted. I don't know of anything like that
available as freeware in the Windows world.

Lets start with a known working version of fdisk that sees my c: drive.

Where do I get such a thing? Or can one be made through Windows2k?

8210GUY

Personally I nearly always find the makers utility's the easiest tool to use doing such things, have you tried that ?
>>>Here<<< is their installation utility, TBH I haven't used it personally, but if it's anything like Maxblast for Maxtor drives you can set partitions format and copy partitions, my hope is this will do the same for you, they also have a utility called >>>SeaTools<<< for diagnostics incase that helps, see if it does what you need.

loninappleton

Yep I have all my Seatools and Maxblast disks for various hardware... also some Western Digital.

I'll give the Seatools a whirl again but I thought that would only do
formatting.

As I recall it had some sort of hard time seeing the drive. I'd rather practice
with dividing up a drive on one of my old small ones first. Old small one is a WD.

Also fdisk is supposed to be rock steady unlike some other tools.

linderman

well food for thought : it may have some bearing for you ????



Fdisk is for the Fat file system only (fat, Fat16 & Fat32) fdisk does not support drives larger than 127gig (not just partiton size!)

fdisk can not "see" ntfs formatted partitions; is your C drive NTFS ?????

if it is; it wont be seen

you may want to invesitgate Super Fdisk ????? its free

http://www.download.com/Super-Fdisk/...-10287081.html

hwm54112

use seatools to format and partition the drive to 160 gig. Then use xxclone for your cloning operations. It's fast, easy, reliable and the size of the partitions doesn't matter as long as the partition you are cloning to is as large as the used space of the drive you are cloning.

loninappleton

The goal is to be able to swap backups in and out, so I think that I'd want
Seatools to reformat as a 120.

I loaded Seatools and it looks like it can do such partitioning down to
120. My file system is NTFS.

I use Ghost 7 so I want the backup operation to be as uncomplicated as
possible from primary to primary partition.

I haven't wiped the drive yet.

The other tool I'm familiar with is CloneMaxx but I haven't attempted to run
that one from this 160 down to a 120.

hwm54112

then partition it to 120 with seatools and use xxclone. you'll end up with 2 120gig bootable drives exactly the same except one will have an additional 30 gig drive

loninappleton

Ok, this looks like the way to go. Thanks.

loninappleton

I had an inquiry about xxclone.

How can it run from the HD in the OS?

I would suspect that it would have one of those auto installers to
a floppy and run from there.

linderman

nope thats the beauty and simplicity of the program it runs from within windoz


here is a "How to"

http://www.techsupportforum.com/hard...her-drive.html

loninappleton

But if you have a down drive like the one I have which issued a 'stop error'
while booting, you need the ability to salvage a backup using removable media.

The old proverb is that the drive can't look at itself without changing...
like the Heisenberg Principle. :-/


I will look at the troubleshooters and have some other questions posted today
on a Dell workstation.

Thanks for answering.

linderman

hello:


food for thought:


hard drives have gotten so large that removable media back-ups are really obsolete and insanely time consuming.

I highly suggest you invest in a spare drive; from there you can keep updaing your clone or image files and thats the most cost effective way too! for about $50.00 on ebay you can get 250 gig drives.

gosh; when I gave up on the imaging to DVD disks becasue it literally took days to span across 15 DVD disks to back-up a 160 gig drive! YUCK and do think about doing that every two weeks >>>> no thanks

you can very cost effectively install a cheap 250 gig IDE drive into an external hard drive enclosure then do this
http://www.techsupportforum.com/arti...ard-drive.html


the trick to good back up plan is spending literally little time to perform the routine back-up and spend minimal time restoring from a back-up
the fastest is the cloned second drive; if you get a crashing boot drive then change your boot order and boot into the "other cloned" boot drive = no time lost

if I failed to address your concerns; please let me know

loninappleton

I'm not cloning to dvds or cds. I have paired HDs to clone to.

What I don't get is how xxclone can look at the drive it's on
and copy the whole thing to the slave connection.


Alternatively, I have Ghost installed to floppy and cd for use with
various builds. I haven't run across any motherboards with no floppy
connection yet.