Spooky partitions

Discussion in 'Acronis Disk Director Suite' started by cv55, May 27, 2007.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. cv55

    cv55 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2007
    Posts:
    8
    For my 1st IDE hard disk, the XP disk manager lists in the "grafical view" 2 partitions, that do not exist: a "free space" and some "non allocated" space; according to the indicated size, both seem to 'duplicate' existing partitions, the primary + a logical volume. (The sum total is 160 GB - the disk has only 120 GB.)

    Disk Director (9) however, does not 'find' these partitions - but it finds a 2nd "primary partition", within the extended partition (this should be a logical one, although containing an OS).

    I have no good idea, how this strange situation did come about - and how to come back to a partition table, that is valid for all those involved...

    / PS: the volume table is or should be:
    primary: NTFS (XP),
    logical-1: ext3,
    log-2: lx-swap
    log-3: NTFS (w2k) - [this one is shown as 'primary' by DD]
    log-4/5/6: NTFS/Fat32 (some data)
    The system contains futhermore an IDE hardware Raid, that is ok. *May be*, that the 2nd primary partition is a consequence of my attempts to repair a broken Linux Grub-"menu.lst" after a change of the old partition table during a XP reinstallation.

    Thanks for any hints,
    cv.
     
  2. MudCrab

    MudCrab Imaging Specialist

    Joined:
    Nov 3, 2006
    Posts:
    6,483
    Location:
    California
    It may help if you could post screenshots of both Windows Disk Manager and the DD partition screens.

    What build of 9 are you using?

    Do the partitions show up correctly when you are booted into your Linux setup? gparted, qparted, etc.
     
  3. cv55

    cv55 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2007
    Posts:
    8
    Please see below.

    9.0.554

    No, I presume. Actually, I can't boot it - that is, what made me become aware of the problem: I am using the Windows bootloader for all OSs, having stored the Linux MBR in a file on C:\. Some software problems let me re-install Win-XP; unfortunately re-formatting C: apparently means 'changing the partition table': So when next trying to boot Linux, Grub did not start anything (black screen with blinking cursor...). I tried to 'repair' the menu.lst manually and to re-install Grub by aid of a live-CD, but without success. When deciding to completely re-install Linux, I found the reported situation - now wondering whether it might be a good idea to continue the 'local' patch-jobs - or better 'clean' the whole disk...

    cv.
     

    Attached Files:

  4. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

    Joined:
    Mar 9, 2006
    Posts:
    2,591
    Location:
    State College, Pennsylvania
    cv:

    It looks to me like the partition table on your disk 1 is messed up. The reason that Windows Disk Manager shows such a strange layout is because it expects the logical partitions to be in a continuous chain from first to last. On your layout the chain is broken by the primary partition for W2k.

    Before giving up it might be worth trying to convert the W2k partition from primary to logical using the "Convert" function on the "Advanced" menu of DD. If this works then you should have an unbroken chain of logicals again, and the Windows Disk Manager display should fix itself.

    Hopefully you have a way to back up your current partitions because if this operation fails you may lose the W2k partition and the logical partitions to its right.

    If you have TrueImage then I would highly recommend making a backup of your current partitions so that you can restore them if something goes wrong. Better safe than sorry!
     
  5. cortez

    cortez Registered Member

    Joined:
    Nov 19, 2006
    Posts:
    450
    Location:
    Chicago
    I had to create a primary partition on the far side of a logical partition in order to get a TI10/InCD DVD primary image to restore from WITHIN Windows and it resulted in a near identical 'Spooky partition' as cv55 posted.

    I lived with the problem until kOlo suggested a repair. I re-converted the primary partition back to logical and it cleared up the XP disk management 'Spookiness' up! Now all seems well.

    If this will work on cv55's system I can't say, but it did work on four XP's and one data partition. The only way to know for sure is for cv55 to actually try this partition conversion repair.

    EDIT: The disk entries in "My Computer" (which were also out of order) were also corrected with this repair.

    cv55: Good Luck, if you decide to try the repair.

    Now I can make a backup with the corrections.

    Thanks to all-cortez
     
    Last edited: May 31, 2007
  6. cv55

    cv55 Registered Member

    Joined:
    Mar 21, 2007
    Posts:
    8
    k0lo (& cortez):

    converting the 2nd primary partition to a logical one did work fine. Thanks for the tip (to be honest, I never did realize this function, although using DD since the time of "Partition Expert"). The duplicated partition entries disappeared, and in fact, I did not loose any data.

    [for information - and as an apology for my delay:]
    - Bad luck, that I did not realize the latter fact: my w2k did not boot ("missing or damaged hal.dll"), so I did re-install it, thus damaging the XP-bootloader, therefor repairing XP; after having both Wins working again - yet the XP Win explorer displaying 2 identical w2k-partitions (as D:\ and E:\) -, now re-installing Linux (between the 2 Wins - perhaps this is a 'mistake'?) - with the consequence of w2k complaining about a "missing or damaged hal.dll".
    Only now I wondered whether this has nothing to do with any missing or damaged files, but with a wrong partition numbering. In fact, the w2k partition had changed from "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)" to "~partition(2)", while, btw, DD9's volume "properties" specify a "WinNT4/2000/XP number _hda5_"(!), and the Linux fstab listing remarkable things like
    Code:
    # /dev/hda6[!]
    UUID=[$UUID] /media/hda7[!]  ntfs  defaults,nls=utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0  1
    Conclusion? Partition numbering (for me...) seems a bit like roulette. Sometimes russian.
    Thanks again, cv
     
  7. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

    Joined:
    Mar 9, 2006
    Posts:
    2,591
    Location:
    State College, Pennsylvania
    cv:

    Glad to hear that you got it straightened out.

    Yes, the partition numbering will change when you convert a primary partition into a logical partition. I think that Windows was probably confused by your earlier layout, so it's hard to say how it would have interpreted the layout. In Linux it should be straightforward. The primaries are hda1 - hda4. The first logical partition is hda5. So with your initial layout, you should have seen:

    hda1 - WinXP
    hda2 - Win2k
    hda5 - Ubuntu
    hda6 - Linux swap
    hda7 - NTFS P:
    hda8 - FAT32 Exchange Q:
    hda9 - NTFS Mixed O:

    After conversion you should have:

    hda1 - WinXP
    hda5 - Ubuntu
    hda6 - Linux swap
    hda7 - Win2k
    hda8 - NTFS P:
    hda9 - FAT32 Exchange Q:
    hda10 - NTFS Mixed O:

    Therefore you would need to edit fstab in Linux and the boot.ini file in Windows to reflect this layout. A REALLY NICE feature of DD10 is that you can edit both of these files in DD10 (and perhaps your menu.lst file for GRUB) before rebooting into either Windows or Linux.

    The last time that I rearranged the partition layout on my disk I did all of the shuffling around of partitions in DD10, and edited boot.ini for Windows, /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.lst for Linux with DD10 before rebooting. Upon reboot, everything was PERFECT. The ability to do this with DD10 is what really sold me on the program such that it has become my favored partitioning tool.
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.