Why is this never easy?
Jun. 14th, 2005 23:37![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillEvery time I partition a hard drive I run into hardcore problems. This is, unfortunately, no exception.
I have a copy of Fedora Core 4 Final, at last. So this afternoon I started clearing out the Windows XP system, defragging and generally cleaning house in preparation for shrinking the Windows partition. Defrag kept leaving a block of normal files out in the middle of the disk, but I figured I'd talk to the shrink program about whether it wanted to move those.
After cleaning, I booted the Ubuntu Linux live CD and got into a prompt, where I ran ntfsresize, with a -i to just ask it what it thought it could do. It promptly told me that my NTFS partition was corrupt, and advised me firmly to run 'chkdsk /F'. Okay.
It's impossible to run 'chkdsk /F' while Windows is running. Into the Recovery Console I went, and ran chkdsk. Problems reported. Fine -- run 'chkdsk /R', for Repair. It took a long time, but came out clean. One last chkdsk to check (clean) and I was set.
I booted back into Windows, and (paranoid as I am) ran chkdsk again. Oh, look, there are problems with the filesystem again! The Recovery Console agreed. Not liking the smell of this, I ran it all again and booted back into Windows, to find the corruption had returned. Again.
So I now seem to have NTFS corruption (something about the Volume Bitmap showing empty space as allocated, chkdsk isn't saying much) which is "solved" by chkdsk repair, and reinstated by booting XP. Lovely. ntfsresize won't touch a corrupted filesystem, so I can't repartition and install linux until I fix this somehow. And everyone seems to be suggesting Partition Magic, but I'm dead broke and do not own this wonderful piece of proprietary software, nor do I know whether it could help.
My options appear to be:
1) Run 'chkdsk /R' in the Recovery Console, boot straight into Ubuntu rather than XP, and see whether it's "clean" enough for ntfsresize. This might work if it's XP booting that's actually causing the corruption. I have to wonder what booting XP afterward might do, though.
2) Wipe the disk and do a low-level disk check, then reinstall XP from the recovery disk, and see whether the filesystem is sufficiently sane to shrink it. It might be a lot of work just to put me back where I started.
3) Wipe the disk, do a low-level check, fdisk it from linux, then install XP on a newly minted partition using the copy we have at home. It wouldn't be the version I bought with the new laptop, but it would be _a_ version, and it wouldn't insist on taking the whole disk as recovery CDs tend to. This is the option I'll probably end up taking, provided the low-level stuff doesn't reveal a list of hardware horrors.
4) Investigate hardware options. I didn't buy the CompUSA warranty with the machine (never needed one before), but many manufacturers have 90-day limited warranties, and most hard drives are guaranteed for a year. I could probably get the hard drive replaced, but it might cost money to have the old one removed without voiding any overall warranties (and I hate the idea of cracking it myself when it's barely a month old). This option strikes me as a potentially huge hassle, though, and might involve shipping it off for six weeks etc.
Those are the options I can see. I'd love to hear whether anyone else has other suggestions.
I hate partitioning. Hate hate hate. Why can't it ever work smoothly for me?
Update: Nick suggested option 5: Find diagnostic tools for this hard drive. Turns out it's a Seagate Momentus 42 (yay). The good news is, Seagate has a decent-looking diagnostic suite readily available. I'll try that tomorrow.
I have a copy of Fedora Core 4 Final, at last. So this afternoon I started clearing out the Windows XP system, defragging and generally cleaning house in preparation for shrinking the Windows partition. Defrag kept leaving a block of normal files out in the middle of the disk, but I figured I'd talk to the shrink program about whether it wanted to move those.
After cleaning, I booted the Ubuntu Linux live CD and got into a prompt, where I ran ntfsresize, with a -i to just ask it what it thought it could do. It promptly told me that my NTFS partition was corrupt, and advised me firmly to run 'chkdsk /F'. Okay.
It's impossible to run 'chkdsk /F' while Windows is running. Into the Recovery Console I went, and ran chkdsk. Problems reported. Fine -- run 'chkdsk /R', for Repair. It took a long time, but came out clean. One last chkdsk to check (clean) and I was set.
I booted back into Windows, and (paranoid as I am) ran chkdsk again. Oh, look, there are problems with the filesystem again! The Recovery Console agreed. Not liking the smell of this, I ran it all again and booted back into Windows, to find the corruption had returned. Again.
So I now seem to have NTFS corruption (something about the Volume Bitmap showing empty space as allocated, chkdsk isn't saying much) which is "solved" by chkdsk repair, and reinstated by booting XP. Lovely. ntfsresize won't touch a corrupted filesystem, so I can't repartition and install linux until I fix this somehow. And everyone seems to be suggesting Partition Magic, but I'm dead broke and do not own this wonderful piece of proprietary software, nor do I know whether it could help.
My options appear to be:
1) Run 'chkdsk /R' in the Recovery Console, boot straight into Ubuntu rather than XP, and see whether it's "clean" enough for ntfsresize. This might work if it's XP booting that's actually causing the corruption. I have to wonder what booting XP afterward might do, though.
2) Wipe the disk and do a low-level disk check, then reinstall XP from the recovery disk, and see whether the filesystem is sufficiently sane to shrink it. It might be a lot of work just to put me back where I started.
3) Wipe the disk, do a low-level check, fdisk it from linux, then install XP on a newly minted partition using the copy we have at home. It wouldn't be the version I bought with the new laptop, but it would be _a_ version, and it wouldn't insist on taking the whole disk as recovery CDs tend to. This is the option I'll probably end up taking, provided the low-level stuff doesn't reveal a list of hardware horrors.
4) Investigate hardware options. I didn't buy the CompUSA warranty with the machine (never needed one before), but many manufacturers have 90-day limited warranties, and most hard drives are guaranteed for a year. I could probably get the hard drive replaced, but it might cost money to have the old one removed without voiding any overall warranties (and I hate the idea of cracking it myself when it's barely a month old). This option strikes me as a potentially huge hassle, though, and might involve shipping it off for six weeks etc.
Those are the options I can see. I'd love to hear whether anyone else has other suggestions.
I hate partitioning. Hate hate hate. Why can't it ever work smoothly for me?
Update: Nick suggested option 5: Find diagnostic tools for this hard drive. Turns out it's a Seagate Momentus 42 (yay). The good news is, Seagate has a decent-looking diagnostic suite readily available. I'll try that tomorrow.
