Drive C 'Not formatted' ??

[veeblefetzer]

Howdy

Just purchased the software and installed it.

It says that my C drive is not formatted. Interesting considering it runs from my C drive. The seagate drive has a 1TB capacity. The other two are 300G and 500G. Drive is model ST1000528AS

Disk management is ok with it. Diskpart.exe is ok with it. Partition Manager ... not so ok with it.

Also noticed that the volume labels on two of my drives are truncated at character number 10. No big deal though ..

Windows XP SP2 fully up to date.

Have attached an image.

Any ideas?

[Paragon_Tommy]

Hello veeblefetzer,

I would start with a system check disk just to rule out any errors we have lurking.

Start > Run > "cmd" > chkdisk /f

[Paragon_Tony]

Hi veeblefetzer,

Are you using any disk encryption software by chance?

If not, run CHKDSK /f and possibly CHKDSK /R as Tommy suggested to see if this is possibly related to errors on the disk.

Please provide a screenshot of the Windows Disk Map so we can inspect the drives and compare (right click My Computer - Manage - Disk Management).

This most often is a result of incorrect partition parameters; basically the partition boundary extends beyond the end of the drive. Windows ignores this completely, but we cannot. To resolve this using Paragon, you would need to delete the existing partition and then perform an Undelete. This will rebuild the partition table and should correct your problem.

My guess is deleting / undeleting the partition does not sound very appealing, but the success rate for this is quite good. Before attempting it, please boot to the Standard Recovery CD and see if the drive appears the same way there. If it still shows invalid (most likely will) then you'll need to backup the partition using another utility in case the undelete is unsuccessful. With the drive in its current state there will be no way to back it up or copy it using Paragon.

Undelete Partition from DOS Recovery
-Boot from the Standard Partition Manager Recovery CD (created through the installed version)
-Select Safe Mode to enter DOS
-Run PM10 to enter the view the full screen interface. For Personal Edition use the following keyboard shortcut to enter the hidden full screen mode: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Backspace
-Right click the existing partition and choose delete. Check the box to ignore volume label
-Apply changes (CTRL+A)
-Click the Wizards drop-down Menu, Undelete Partitions
-Select the *Free space where the partition you just deleted was
-Check the box to 'Change file system filter and search criteria, Click Next
-If you know what file system was being used (my guess is NTFS) then you can select only that to speed up the search, Click Next
-Skip 'Scan all sectors' and 'Search Indent' for the first attempt
-Enable 'Use all available criteria', Click Next to being the search

Search times can vary greatly depending on the condition of the drive. The regular scan should take about 20min or less. Scanning all sectors may take hours.

[Beto]

To veeblefetzer: Any luck or comments on what u decided to do?

[veeblefetzer]

Howdy

No disk encryption software.

Finally got some time last night to attend to this. My PC is never shutdown so I don't get much of a chance to perform a 2 hour or so chkdsk /f

Anyway, it came up clean as expected.

I've not tried the partition deletion/undeletion and unlikely to as I'm preparing to upgrade the PC soon anyway. There's a bigger drive going in so I'll be curious to see if it does the same thing.

No big deal really .. I bought the software for use in some VMWare machines to hack around partitions for various development reasons. Was more curious to see if it was a known problem. I have no use for it on my machine.

Thanks for attending to my problem though. Good support, in my opinion.

oops. forgot to add the pic you wanted.