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#1
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Hard drive not recognized
I was going to mirror a drive off onto another one, but the Western Digital
software didn't recognize the source drive as having a valid partition to copy from. The windows startup disk doesn't recognize it, but it recognizes the second drive as "C". And Ramdisk is D. FDisk shows it as drive 1 but doesn't give it a drive letter and under file system says "unknown". However, the computer boots from it and into windows just fine. So at this moment I'm copying everything to the second drive in Windows explorer. I don't really care if the second drive boots or not, but I have done it before and it did. The source drive has GOBACK on it... I'm not too familiar with that. Could that have anything to do with why FDSIK can't identify it? The drive is only 9 gigs and I'm sure there's no overlay. If there was, it'd have been EZ-Drive and the WD disk would have recognized it. I wonder if an FDISK /mbr would be in order? -- -- Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. -- |
#2
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FDISK /MBR on a drive with an unrecognised partition is strongly not
recommended. The symptoms you describe are exactly like a custom partitioning of some type, so I would assume it's GoBack. What does the GoBack documentation say about boot from floppy or using a GoBack drive as a second drive an another machine? Do they mention some special booting procedure? -- Jeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) "Menno Hershberger" wrote in message ... I was going to mirror a drive off onto another one, but the Western Digital software didn't recognize the source drive as having a valid partition to copy from. The windows startup disk doesn't recognize it, but it recognizes the second drive as "C". And Ramdisk is D. FDisk shows it as drive 1 but doesn't give it a drive letter and under file system says "unknown". However, the computer boots from it and into windows just fine. So at this moment I'm copying everything to the second drive in Windows explorer. I don't really care if the second drive boots or not, but I have done it before and it did. The source drive has GOBACK on it... I'm not too familiar with that. Could that have anything to do with why FDSIK can't identify it? The drive is only 9 gigs and I'm sure there's no overlay. If there was, it'd have been EZ-Drive and the WD disk would have recognized it. I wonder if an FDISK /mbr would be in order? |
#3
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Well, I read more than I cared to hear. Some pretty good horror stories,
Goback does indeed alter the master boot record. Symantec has instructions on how to get rid of it. "To force GoBack to be removed from the master boot record" is the title of one section... :-) What started the whole thing was that this lady had tried to install Norton Antivirus 2005 and it wouldn't install. So she used Goback to go back to two or three different "restore points". I finally brought the computer in to work on it. Editing everything Norton/Symantec out of the registry and removing all files and folders relating to Symantec did not help. Also, Windows Update does not work, and I tried all the fixes for that to no avail. I even did a reinstall of SE (an overinstall) which made no difference at all with either problem. Apparently this version of Goback was from before Symantec acquired it, because none of the Symantec removal stuff affected it at all. I copied the whole drive to another with Windows Explorer. After a sys c: and copying a good copy of msdos.sys to it I can boot that one up. It does not have an altered boot record, but it still won't let me install NAV or do Windows Updates. I'm just going to wipe her original drive clean and do a clean install and then retrieve her data from the mirrored drive. I told her when I took it that it'd probably cost her $25-$30... :-) Ouch. "Jeff Richards" wrote FDISK /MBR on a drive with an unrecognised partition is strongly not recommended. The symptoms you describe are exactly like a custom partitioning of some type, so I would assume it's GoBack. What does the GoBack documentation say about boot from floppy or using a GoBack drive as a second drive an another machine? Do they mention some special booting procedure? -- Jeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) "Menno Hershberger" wrote in message ... I was going to mirror a drive off onto another one, but the Western Digital software didn't recognize the source drive as having a valid partition to copy from. The windows startup disk doesn't recognize it, but it recognizes the second drive as "C". And Ramdisk is D. FDisk shows it as drive 1 but doesn't give it a drive letter and under file system says "unknown". However, the computer boots from it and into windows just fine. So at this moment I'm copying everything to the second drive in Windows explorer. I don't really care if the second drive boots or not, but I have done it before and it did. The source drive has GOBACK on it... I'm not too familiar with that. Could that have anything to do with why FDSIK can't identify it? The drive is only 9 gigs and I'm sure there's no overlay. If there was, it'd have been EZ-Drive and the WD disk would have recognized it. I wonder if an FDISK /mbr would be in order? -- -- Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. -- |
#4
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You've no doubt learned as much from the experience, but the conventional
wisdom is that you shouldn't touch a Windows 98 system that has a failed Norton AV 2005 installation. Some people say the same for 2004. The uninstaller provided on the Symantec www site might help, but I would guess that when it's combined with something like GoBack the problems just multiply. Ouch! indeed. -- Jeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) "Menno Hershberger" wrote in message ... Well, I read more than I cared to hear. Some pretty good horror stories, Goback does indeed alter the master boot record. Symantec has instructions on how to get rid of it. "To force GoBack to be removed from the master boot record" is the title of one section... :-) What started the whole thing was that this lady had tried to install Norton Antivirus 2005 and it wouldn't install. So she used Goback to go back to two or three different "restore points". I finally brought the computer in to work on it. Editing everything Norton/Symantec out of the registry and removing all files and folders relating to Symantec did not help. Also, Windows Update does not work, and I tried all the fixes for that to no avail. I even did a reinstall of SE (an overinstall) which made no difference at all with either problem. Apparently this version of Goback was from before Symantec acquired it, because none of the Symantec removal stuff affected it at all. I copied the whole drive to another with Windows Explorer. After a sys c: and copying a good copy of msdos.sys to it I can boot that one up. It does not have an altered boot record, but it still won't let me install NAV or do Windows Updates. I'm just going to wipe her original drive clean and do a clean install and then retrieve her data from the mirrored drive. I told her when I took it that it'd probably cost her $25-$30... :-) Ouch. "Jeff Richards" wrote FDISK /MBR on a drive with an unrecognised partition is strongly not recommended. The symptoms you describe are exactly like a custom partitioning of some type, so I would assume it's GoBack. What does the GoBack documentation say about boot from floppy or using a GoBack drive as a second drive an another machine? Do they mention some special booting procedure? -- Jeff Richards MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User) "Menno Hershberger" wrote in message ... I was going to mirror a drive off onto another one, but the Western Digital software didn't recognize the source drive as having a valid partition to copy from. The windows startup disk doesn't recognize it, but it recognizes the second drive as "C". And Ramdisk is D. FDisk shows it as drive 1 but doesn't give it a drive letter and under file system says "unknown". However, the computer boots from it and into windows just fine. So at this moment I'm copying everything to the second drive in Windows explorer. I don't really care if the second drive boots or not, but I have done it before and it did. The source drive has GOBACK on it... I'm not too familiar with that. Could that have anything to do with why FDSIK can't identify it? The drive is only 9 gigs and I'm sure there's no overlay. If there was, it'd have been EZ-Drive and the WD disk would have recognized it. I wonder if an FDISK /mbr would be in order? -- -- Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy. -- |
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