adidas1677

Hello, first thanks for taking the time to read through my problem I am having. I want to say that I am not new to PC's at all and I know my way around them pretty well.

One thing that I know very little about however is hard drive partitioning. I know what it does and the reason you would partition a hard drive but I dont know how to do it or in my case when it is done how to undo it. So on with my question.

I have a 250GB hard drive that I use for video, music, and picture editing. I also have another hard drive 120GB that I use only for playing video games. I have quite a few games on the 120 GB drives taking up 88.4% of my drive space. I have a friend who came over who thinks he knows everything about computers and wanted to make mine run faster by partitioning my 120gb hard drive so it can access data faster. Honestly my computer is plenty fast enough to access any information it may need for the games I play. I have a AMD duel core athlon64 bit 4200+ processor and 3GB of ram with a radeon 1950x video card. Well he partitioned my hard drive anyways and now I am having graphic glitches left and right and 1/2 my games are crashing.

So how do I un-partition my drive? He has it set up as local D and New Drive E I know that I will probably need to reinstall of my games but I dont care. I just want 1 drive because it just seems alot more easy to me to operate.

Thanks again for your time.

justpassingby

Hi adidas1677 and welcome to TSF !

What program did your friend use to partition your drive ?

Try to run chkdsk d: /F /R to repair possible errors on the drive and see if that solves the problem. Do the same for your e: drive. Also check that his partitioning tool didn't just put half the files on one drive and the other half on the other : all files needed by one game should be in the game folder on the same drive.

Can you tell me what's your current partition scheme ? On which disk is Windows installed right now ? The quickest way if to post a screenshot of your disk management window (right-click on "my computer" => manage => disk management). Use the prt scr key to take a screenshot then paste it in paint and attach it to your next post as a .jpg.

Easiest way to repartition your drives in one and single partition is to use disk management : right-click both partitions you currently have on that drive and click delete partition, then create one single new partition (still using right-click) over the whole unused space. Beware that you'll lose everything that's on the drive using that method, including your saved games that you probably don't want to lose. Better backup them to another drive (on another disk) before you do that.

There are other programs out there, like partition magic or partition logic, that can repartition a drive without losing all the files on it, but when the drive is nearly filled up like yours chances of success aren't 100%.

Partitioning a non system drive won't make you gain any frame per second in your games. You can gain some performances by creating a small swap partition as the first partition of another physical disk than the one holding the system. Also, if you keep all files accessed by a program on a small confined space, those files will be accessed faster, provided those files are also close to the system files and the swap file if they're on the same disk. For games it's quite irrelevant since only your loading times can be improved that way.

Feel free to ask if you want to modify the partition scheme of that computer, but the safe rule is : if it ain't broken don't fix it.

adidas1677

Thanks for the quick reply. Here is the screen shot you asked for.Disk manager.JPG

justpassingby

Well on that screenshot there's only one 80GB disk partitioned in two : your c: system drive and an other d: partition. I don't see any other drives there. You shouldn't change the partitions on that drive since it's holding the system partition. If something bad happens you may not be able to start the computer anymore.

Are your other drives usb or e-sata external drives ?

Also, I've just been thinking : your problems with your games not working anymore are probably because the drive's volume letter has changed. If the game was set to be launched from d:\program files\game\ and that letter is now e: then the game either can't run or can't find the files he needs.

adidas1677

Yeah I was wondering the same thing. I could have been wrong about the size of my 2nd drive but I dont know where my 250GB drive is. It still works cuz i can access all my videos and songs.

justpassingby

Ok, I edited my post while you were writing yours. Is your 250GB drive an e-sata or usb external drive or is it hooked in the computer like your system drive is ?

adidas1677

Yeah my 250gb drive is external. I travel with it alot but it is plugged in right now.

justpassingby

Could you take the drive off of its enclosure and attach it inside your computer ? Remember to unplug the power cable before you do so and to touch a metal part of the case before you handle any internal components. If you know how to hook your drive in the computer, just do it. If you need directions, feel free to ask. What's your motherboard brand and model ? Does it use a sata or an ide interface ? What's the 250GB drive brand and model, is it sata or ide ?

Edit : just realized this would not work if your computer is a laptop. What are your system specs ? Tell us about your computer brand and model if you bought it as a whole package.

The disk not appearing in disk management is not normal. Anyways your friend should never have attempted to repartition it using the external interface. You should always partition a drive when it's hooked inside the computer. What's exactly the external interface you're using with that drive ? USB, firewire, e-sata, ethernet ?

adidas1677

Ok let me ask you this. If its not a good idea to repartition it into 1 drive again how do I get stuff to save to the "2nd" drive. Now every time I try and save something it is telling me I have low space and I should uninstall things. However my 2nd drive has nothing on it.

justpassingby

Hold on a sec here. The drive you shouldn't repartition is the 80GB drive that holds the c: system partition. You can repartition your 250GB drive if you can get it to show in disk management.

What second drive are you talking about here ?
All I know at the moment is that you have a c: 40GB system partition and a d: 40GB partition on one 80GB disk. What are the volume letters assigned to your 250GB drive in "my computer" ?

adidas1677

The drive he partitioned was the internal drive. My 250gb drive is the external and it is a Maxtor. I'm honestly not sure what all that other stuff means that you mentioned seta or ide. I know what an IDE cable is not sure what seta is however. Oh and the model is Maxtor 3100 USB hard drive. Its a 7200 RPM drive.

adidas1677

My external drive is fine. Thats the one I have all my music, home movies, and photos on.

adidas1677

The C drive that is 40 gigs used to be bigger. I thought it was 120 gigs apparently it was only 80. Thats the one that he partitioned. My external drive was not even hooked up when he did the partition on the internal one.

justpassingby

Ok, so that's the 80GB drive your friend partitioned, then it wasn't a bad idea. I thought the 120GB drive was another external drive... I just reread your posts and it makes sense now.

It's better to keep your 80GB drive partitioned as it is now. If you keep the c: partition for windows and non-games programs, they'll work better if they stay there : on a confined space without dormant data you don't use everyday, like games or videos, squeezing between their files.

You should uninstall your games that aren't working anymore and simply reinstall them to d:\program files instead of c:\program files. Then manually copy the save games folders to the location where they should belong in the new game folder on the d: drive.

The 250GB external drive not showing is still weird. When I ask about what interface it uses, I ask on which plug you have to hook it at the back of the motherboard. USB, firewire, e-sata or ethernet are different types of plugs. You can look on wikipedia to see pictures of these if you want. Your maxtor external drive is an USB drive. Sata are thin red data cables that are replacing older IDE broad ribbon cables.

adidas1677

I see. Ok so when I save my games into drive D: Will my computer still be able to have the shortcut buttons on my desktop? If so then all is well and I wont shoot my friend in the big toe for all this headach lol.

justpassingby

Yup, uninstalling the games and reinstalling them on the d: drive will free room on your c: drive and recreate the right shortcuts on your desktop.

If you want to make sure you don't lose your savegames when you uninstall your games, you should backup them elsewhere before. Usually you'll be asked if you want to delete your savegames or not during the unintall process. You'll then have to manually recopy those savegames to the new game folder on the d: drive. For instance, from c:\program files\gamexyz\saves to d:\program files\gamesxyz\saves. If the game used to save the user data to the c:\my documents\ folder (like microsoft games ususally do) then you don't have to do anything. The new installation should find your old saves directly.

adidas1677

Well you are the man. Thanks alot for all your time tonight. My games are all MMO's so the only thing I will need to do is restore all my custom UI settings.

Thanks again you saved me alot of time and my friend a bullet in the big toe.

Girderman

I scanned through the thread and didn't see any mention of what software was used to do the partition.

I just had a disaster from Acronis Disk Director, and have vowed I will never use it again. NicksterUK also has had problems with this software.

Also, I am curious as to what your friend has to say. If he/she can do the parition, they ought to know enough to "un-do" it. I'm trying to reconcile what I've read with what I understand. The idea of a partition making Apps run faster is silly to me, but I'm open minded.

There is so much information so readily available on the Internet that it seems "friend" ought to be able to produce at least one link showing that at the very least he/she wasn't making up BS while messing up your computer.

The reason why I mention this is because it is an acceptable "tweak" to move the pagefile from the O/S drive to another drive as it will speed up access time to the pagefile. However, it is also well-understood that you get no such benefit from installing it on another partition as it's the same hard-drive either way and it's going to be the same hardware doing all the reading & writing no matter where on the hard-drive the data is, whether it's on a separate partition or not.

Since this is true for the pagefule tweak, it must also be true for any other application, and so I am curious about what was in friend's brain housing group at the time the nefarious deed was done.

justpassingby

My opinion is he was trying to setup a partition for windows system files and other microsoft programs and another partition for backup and games. It's not a bad idea since system/boot/page files then stay closer to each others and this can help the computer boot a bit faster and microsoft applications to load quicker. It can also help reduce fragmentation speed if you get used to save all the downloads you're doing from the internet to the non-system partition.

If you have on single parition on the system drive where you have your windows files, your downloads and your games/media/backups, then the last critical update from MS probably ended at the end of the drive fragmented in a dozen of tiny bits. If that file is needed during the computer boot time, you just lost some precious milliseconds. You'll have to defragment more often on such a configuration than on a correctly partitioned drive.

Girderman

It was this notion that I was looking for, as it is the opposite of what I understand. I'm open minded. Do you have any link or anything that would substantiate this ?