Lost Drive Specification

[raywise]

:( I'm hoping someone can help me sort this out. I was using Partition Magic 7 Pro to resize my c partition in my 40G Seagate drive. All seemed to go well but it hung on the reboot and would not proceed once BIOS had loaded. I have tried the rescue discs but I keep getting a "Could not load DOS" message.
So I then used a boot WIN98 boot disc, and attempts to find my individual drive letters (4 partitions) are met with the old "Invalid Drive Specification" message. I loaded a disc diagnostic suite and the partitions with all the data values show up straight away.

I'm not sure what I have to do to fix this problem, is it a master boot problem or similar. I have a dual boot with WinME/XP PRO, but I can't access anything. This is the first time Partition Magic has fouled up on me, usually runs fine.

Any help to get my drive working again would end my suffering and I would be extremely grateful.

Best Regards
Ray W

[BipolarBill]

Try FDISK /MBR from a startup disk. Use the Seagate Seatools to verify that the drive didn't just up and die.

[raywise]

Thanks Bill. Yep, I've downloaded Seatools and will give it a go when I get home tonight. Its only a new drive (3 months) and was fine yesterday, sooo..... Will let you know the outcome,

With Regards

[raywise]

:eek: Wow, what a mind bender this turned out to be Bill. The Seagate disc tools reported everything as it should have been, all partitions there, FAT32 etc.. When I boot from startup disc into DOS, it reported that C: drive was only 10MB in size!, and 2 other partitions were invalid. Partition Magic really did a number on this one!.

After using FDISK twice, and formatting the C: partition it STILL reported only 10MB capacity. (Should have been 8 GB). After the 3rd attempt, it formatted correctly and it was fine. One other partition is still an unknown format, but I'll attend to that later. I'm going to reinstall Windows and at least get my system running again so any other issues can hopefully be sorted. PHEW!

With Regards
Ray Wise

[BipolarBill]

Bleah! :(

That's a bad-hair day.

[raywise]

:eek: :eek: My hair just fell out Bill!. I think this problem may be due in part to suspect IDE Motherboard controllers. I noticed for the last few days before this problem that my cd-rw and DVD would keep disappearing from my system, and the Secondary IDE controller from the devices list would be missing. Now when I keep trying to reinstall windows using my cd drive, it will more often than not read the cd, or DVD drive and just give a "CDR101- cannot read from device" type message. Also in Bios, both optical drives are listed in what looks like Hierogliphics, totally non readable. I've done a BIOS update, still the same.

In Seagate Discwizard, the 2 hard drives are listed on an "unkown motherboard controller", not IDE or ATA, soooo the only thing I can think of now is the onboard controllers being suspect.
I'll keep fiddling and see what happens.
:rolleyes:

Hoo Roo

[BipolarBill]

You really need to clear CMOS on that board, Ray. Unplug it and do so. Update the BIOS if you can.

[raywise]

Will give that a go and see if things improve :t

[raywise]

To bring this little saga to an end Bill, I did the CMOS clear, but the problem still remained. So I moved things around and found out in the process that my secondary IDE controller seems to be no good. Why that went south I don't know, but everything is up and running now, thanks for your input.

After all that as well my CD-RW stopped reading/responding along the way, so got a new one, all is fine.

:t

[BipolarBill]

Sometimes, a slightly sour drive on one IDE controller can affect the other. Keep that in mind.