Hard Drive Health

I just installed a second hard drive on my Windows XP Pro desktop, then installed Partition Magic to format it. PM recognized all other drives except it says my main drive (the system drive) is 'BAD'. The Windows Disk Manager says the drive is 'healthy'. Should I be concerned? MM

 

I recommend you don't use Partition Magic. I have had problems using it for making partitions and formatting, it is good for resizing partitions though. I use Windows or or the HDD manufacturer's drive setup utilities to make and format partitions.

Matt

 

Thanks Matt, I have had good luck in the past with Partition Magic, but the main reason I couldn't use the Windows partition utility was because I wanted to format the new hard drive FAT32 so I could access and write to it from both my Windows XP and Linux dual boot and Windows would not let me do it. MM

 

Windows is fussy about partitions. It won't like the way Linux would make a partition and maybe a partition made by PM (and the problem may not show itself until later, which happened to me, but that was quite a while ago now although I haved stayed clear, like I said). XP can even have trouble with Vista partitions.

I haven't seen XP refuse to format in FAT32. Are you making free-space on the hard disk, then asking XP to make a partition and format that free-space? Maybe it's just that I haven't come across it before.

Matt

 

Actually, PW made the partition for the second hard drive fine. It was already formatted in NTFS so Windows partitioner would not format it backwards to FAT32. My only concern is with the first hard drive which is NTFS and shows up as healthy in Windows disk management and PW shows it as 'BAD ". However, currently everything is working OK. MM

 

I'll say good luck, because the problems I had didn't show up for a while.

Windows won't "downgrade" to FAT32, you need to delete/remove the partition/volume, then make a new one.

"BAD" might give you a hint that Windows and Partition Magic make partitions differently.

Again, good luck.

Matt

 

Thanks Christer, that fits in with my general knowledge, not that I could explain it.

 

Thanks to both Matt and Christer! I thought I had deleted the partition before trying to create a new one, but maybe I was stuck in "conversion ". I now think to be on the safe side I will change to a new primary hard drive and reinstall everything. I do have backups of everything and will make sure to double-check. I am trying to run both XP Pro and Linux Ubuntu with a second hard drive formatted in FAT32 because both XP and Ubuntu can access and write to FAT32 but not to NTFS. Thanks again, I will let you know if I need more help with this. MM