Bios not seeing HD's

[mbaybut2]

I'm running ME and I just started getting a few problems. I would get a windows protection error blue screen so I would reboot. On the boot up sequence the memory count will just keep looping until I press esc to skip memory check. Then the bios doesn't pick up the HD's. I then select to get into windows in safe mode, then reboot to normal mode. Sometimes it works, other times not. Windows picks up the HD's (2) which have been partioned into C-M. I've just remembered that I had C-N. So I seem to have lost partition somewhere.As a consequence some of my shortcuts will no longer work, but I can work around that. Any ideas on what I can do?
TIA,
Mike

 

[Nick Scott]

Hi

The BIOS must be picking up your HDDs otherwise you couldn't boot into safe mode. Nothing on the drives would be accessible to the PC at all.

I think that you have too many partitions. By my count C - M means that you had 12 partitions on only two drives. I had always understood that the max per disk is 5 (one primary and 4 logical drives in an extended partition). The number of FAT tables must be astronomical and initialising them must take an age.

I would fdisk and cut down the number of partitions to a more manageable number. Then reinstall Windows again.

 

[mbaybut2]

Nick,
Thanks. What happen was I reset my bios to load fail safe options which some how didn't register them. I set them up manually and now they appear. Could you explain a little bit more about them partitions. I hae C-N on 3 disks, I thought I only had 2. Is there a way, apart from physically looking in the case how many actual drives I have. Should all the partitions be fat32? I have a few that are just fat.
Mike

 

[Dan O]

Every drive should be posted when you boot. Or you could go into BIOS setup and look for a discover option. A drive can be partitioned any way you like. FAT is okay for partitions less than 512MB, but FAT32 is safer as it uses two FAT tables, one for backup. I like to partition a drive into three, OS, Data, and Backup. If you want to change sizes you need a third party utility such as PartitionMagic. I hope I anwsered your questions. If not fire us some more and we will try to help.

 

[Nick Scott]

To find out how many actual hard drives theer are in your PC without opening the case go to Device manager (from Control panel - system icon) and expand the disk drives info by clicking on the + sign.

There will be an entry there for each actual drive (not partitions) as well as one for the floppy disk drive.

The fact that you have so many partitions makes me suspect that when your drive(s) were initially partitioned someone chose not to enable large hard drive support while performing fdisk. This would force each partition to be a maximum of 2GB in size as the FAT table is limited to 16 bits (FAT16). The newer standard or FAT 32 enables much larger hard drives and massive partitions (unfeasibly large).

To check out what you have got open My Computer, then right click on a drive and choose properties from the popup menu. It will say under file system FAT (which is FAT16) or FAT32.

If you've got FAT16 you might want to consider reorganising your partitions. You don't need to reinstall Windows to do this. Partition Magic can resize, merge and change the file system type from FAT to FAT32 without any problems.

I agree that it is rarely necessary to have more than 3 or 4 partitions on any PC system. The only exceptions are when you want to multiple boot, or if your hard drive is so massive that scandisk and defrag take longer than over-night to complete.

Hope that some or all of this helps.