GameBanshee Forums

What would cause a partition on a harddrive to be deleted and the user had absolutely nothing to do with it. All I did was just install DirectX off of my BF2 disks and bye-bye goes my partition. I can get all the data back, but I was just wondering what would have caused such an accident.

Personally - then I haven't heard of (suddenly) missing partitions withouth something like servere has happened; such as a faulty drive or if the partition was faulty to begin with somehow.

Some kind of Windows error?

Did one partition disappear or was it the hard drive itself?

Just one partition vanished. Although the weird thing is that the copy of DirectX that I installed was to C:\ and not D:\, so the only thing that I can presume is that the partition got corrupted and decided to remove itself. Will it make any difference as to whether or not it is a Sata?

Will it make any difference as to whether or not it is a Sata?

I doubt it. If it was SATA related it would have affected a whole drive rather than a partition AFAIK.

How big is the hard drive, and how big was the partition? Windows does not natively support partitions larger than 137MB; the Registry has to be modified to enable support for large drives. (I think the setup program for Windows XP Service Pack 1 can do that automatically if you install the operating system from scratch, but otherwise, you need to edit the Registry manually or use the setup program from the hard drive manufacturer.) I once had a partition vanish because of that, and some of the data was corrupted when I recovered it.

I had to do something like that for my 160GB drive. I got a program from the Maxtor website, I think- Big Drive enabler. If it is the size of the drive that is the problem check with the drive manufacturer.

I think it did require XP Service Pack 1 in addition though.

It is a 160gig and the first partition is 10gb for windows and stuff and the other drive was 137gig if I remember correctly or it might have been about 141gb. I will have to re-install SP 2, because I know that that will allow windows to register the full size of the harddrive when I run through the setup. The strange part about all of it is that even though I redid Drive C, when I was going to format C, it did not read the full size of my 160gb, but when I went along and opened up My Computer, I was able to access the full size that it was before I formatted C and I was able to read all of my data. Well, what I will probably have to do is go along to my friends house and backup all of my data onto that machine and then reformat both drives and go through the painstakingly long process of having to update everything again. May I ask what programme you used to recover your data?