Phantom partition: I see it, but it can't exist.

On my trusted, battle-scarred laptop I have had a lot of partitions for several years:
C: Primary, 3GB, Windows 98 + apps
D: Primary, 50MB, DOS (bootable with some tricks, FAT16)
E: Logical, 500MB, temporary files
F: Logical, 400MB, Windows swap (FAT16)
G: Logical, 1500MB, hot work files + application data
H: Logical, 5000MB, cold work files, software installers, etc.
Linux Swap, logical, 300MB
Linux Root, logical, 3950MB (includes clean copy of all C: files!!)
NetBSD "slice ", primary, 1600MB.

All was well, and still is, as this setup makes my system very hard to mess up in a fatal way.

First, strange, symptom: from the very start, years ago, Windows refused to assign letters to partitions in this sequence, although they are laid out like this on the hard disk. I fixed it with Vadim Burtyanski's "Letter Assigner ", a program that reassigns letters ad lib on boot. It worked well for years.

Today, Windows started having hallucinations: A routine run of Defragmenter ended in a bluescreen. I rebooted and Windows discovered a nearly 5GB "unformatted" partition. All other partitions seemed fine.

I tried several things, to no avail:

- restoring the partition table from one I backed up weeks ago, when all ran smooth

- undoing the letter reassignment

- striking out the Linux and NetBSD partitions from the partition table

- striking out and re-assigning the large "cold" partition on H:

Nothing seems to work.

Give or take a few 10s or MB (4869MB in the H: properties, 4879MB in the formatting dialog for the phantom D, Windows seems to have "rediscovered" the H: partition and to have assigned it both H: and D:.

H: works fine read/write, but I know it must be corrupted somewhere twd. the end, D: is marked "unformatted ".

I suspect the crash set up some fake marks on the partition, which do not correspond to the partition table.

I have backups of everything, incl. the OS, so I could blow it all over to another PC, reformat the whole disk etc., but I'd like to try to fix it in a less dramatic way, as if I were all alone in a hotel room in some godforsaken place.

QUESTIONS

1) How do I get info on the partition AS IT IS ON THE DRIVE rather than AS IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE FROM THE PARTITION TABLE? Is there some tool I can use?

2) This is the 1st time I get damage from a defragmentation - something I always feared would happen, but never did before in untold years of computing. Is this kind of damage typical?

(and also,
3)The older problem, for which I do have a fix: why on earth does Windows decide to deviate from naming partitions in the order they sit on the disk?}

I hope someone will find this entertaining, and that someone, perhaps the same people, maybe others, will suggest some answers !

 

Fair question Steve, thank you for asking!

1) A D: drive popped up in "My Computer "

2) The former D: drive got bumped to I:, and all other drives assumed preposterous identities untill called to task by means of Letter Assigner (had to do it to keep many links and setups from breaking). Yet, Letter Assigner could not ressign D: to anything else, claiming it could not get "correct information ".

3) D: drive would not open on clicking. Dialog offered to format. Format dialog claimed the partition size was 4879MB

4) NetBSD and Linux partitions still alive and well.

5) Sum of partition sizes from all the various claimants now adds to ~24GB. It would be nice, 'cept this is a 19+GB drive.

The latest piece of utterly confusing news is that
- I dumped an Opera browser cache (which used to sit on E:, and still runs OK on the newly renamed E:
- but when I cleared the garbage folder, all those 3000 files were listed as in D: (at NO POINT were they ever in any partition named D:, even momentarily)
- now I can't see those 3000 files, but every time I clear out the garbage, I am asked to confirm their deletion, which completes in an impossible 3 seconds, and generates another dialog saying that D: is not formatted.

A point I missed was that durng the original crash, the bluescreen reported
"Fatal Error: Missing Segment ".

The lappy still works reliably (rebooted many times into various OSs, and I am working on it in Win98 now), but something is clearly messed up!


I hope I can avoid having to move out all the neatly set up Windows, Apps & stuff for some partition rebuilding!

 

Any hints, anyone?

Should I burn this PC or can I fix it?

 

Hi, Filippo,
I would try and copy as much as you can from the Laptop and fit it out
with a new HDD - or buy a new machine as you suggest.
The present HDD seems to fading away.
Having said that, maybe ....
Have you had a good look at the disk structure with eg Partition Magic ?
regards

 

>> The present HDD seems to fading away.

Merlin, you're sending shivers down my spine.

I am beginning to resign to to backing up everything on another comp., scrubbing the HD, and doing a brutal burn-in test before rebuilding - or swapping it out.

Thanks!

Filippo

 

>>Only use windows defrag to defrag a windows drive.

Tony, for a moment I thought you'd be nuts... then I realized you must have meant a FATxx or NTFS partition with some Linux on it, which is far from unthinkable.

Among other things, Linux produces a large number of zero-byte files, which systematically attract the attention of disk-cleaning utilities.

No, I'd studiously avoid massaging Linux from Windows. My non-Windows partitions are normally invisible to Windows, unless I use some special tools.

The latest news is, some seven months have elapsed since my original post, the lappie still works fine, I installed another Linux in the big Linux partition, and all is working properly.

I will probably move all the OS's and data off the drive, and give it a good thrashing: the drive is relatively new - installed a couple of years back, but used very little, and never on the road, so I assume that damage was inflicted by the OS, and test the *&@! out of the HD to make sure.