Re: Reformatting the C system drive
- From: Big Al <BigAl@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:51:43 GMT
Ron Hirsch wrote:
Thanks, Al & Shenan, for your repliesNewegg has SATA 250 gig drives for 59$, free shipping. I'm not sure what you need but you have a point. At todays prices, its just about brainless to not buy a new one.
To do a "regular" format, not a "quick" format takes about 90 minutes on a new unformatted 400 GB hard drive.
I am not changing any partitions - there is only one on the disk. When restoring a drive via a TI backup image, TI must simply do a "quick" format before writing enverything back to the disk, since the restoration usually take only 10-15 minutes. But I don't want that.
When I do a "chkdsk c: /F" in the run window, that happens the next time I boot up, and there are 3 steps.
When I do the chkdsk in the disk managment window, there are 5 steps (I believe), and the last one takes quite a while. I have had numerous occasions, whrn a disk was reported as "Healthy" by Windows, on the 3 step process, and in teh disk management window. But when I did the check in disk management, the final step (5?) froze along the way, indicating that there was some deep trouble that the 3 step chkdsk did not address. When this occurs, the drive is either history, or possibly a long format will restore it. So I figure it's worth the effort.
After doing a long format, I would run the drive and do the 5 step process in Disk management. If that still locked up in step 5, the drive would be discarded. If it went through OK, I will try to use it again.
I also see no problem formatting a hard drive outside of the machine it is intended for, using another machine running the same XP Pro operating system. Am I missing something here?
And, to try and resolve the logoff/crashesI've been having, I have numerous times restored a previous image to the C drive. That resolved the issue, for a short while, but then it returned. I am beginning to think that the drive itself has problems. Restoring an image gets around them, for a while, but then the problems with the drive start to impact things, and the shutdown crashes start in again.
Based on this, it's improbable that even a full format may not solve my issues, and the replacement drive stands a much better chance of fixing things.
Ron
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"Shenan Stanley" <newshelper@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:ejPexjKpIHA.6096@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ron Hirsch wrote:I think that my C drive is having some issues, and I have a
replacement drive to use if indeed the drive itself is beyond
having a reformat resolve the issues. Before installing a new
drive, which I'll preformat outside of the machine in question,
Why would you attempting to 'pre-format a hard disk drive outisde of the
machine it will be used in'?
I'd like to take a shot at formatting the existing drive in place, and
then restore a current image of that drive via my True Image boot
CD.
A *current* image - or one where things were actually wotrking as you
expectec?
So I want to reformat my 400 GB C while it's in place in the
machine. If I boot up into Windows, and go to a command prompt, and
then key in "format c:" - will I then get a message stating that it
cannot do that while Windows is running, and will do so the next
time when I start a "bootup"
I don't think you got this - as far as I know, if you try to format the
system drive within windows - it just says you cannot. Nothing about next
boot.
, following which of course, it will
not boot up, as there will be nothing installed on the C drive. If
this will work, I could then boot up from the TI recovery CD, which
will run True Image from the CD, and allow me to restore an image
that I created before starting this whole process.
You can do that without ever formatting anything. TrueImage will gladly
overwrite anything and everything on whatever drive uyou decide to put in
there.
But can I format the C drive this way? I see no path to do the
format process in True Image ver 11 capabilities, or have I missed
this.
When using imaging software - it is the partitioning that matters - not
formatting. The 'format' is included in the partition image you are going
to apply to whatever drive. It is the partitioning that you must do (and is
already done if you have a working system.)
I know I can remove the drive, and format it via an external USB
connection to another machine, and then put it back in place. But
I'd like to avoid the added work to do it this way.
That would be as worthless now as the first part where you were going to
pre-format the new drive before putting it into the system. Just use a
Windows XP boot CD or a BartPE boot CD or a DOS boot diskette or a DOS boot
CD or a utility of your choice to boot up and clear the partitions and
create new ones if you want to be sure you have a clean slate to start with.
How about my Knoppix or Bart PE disks - are they a usable choice
also?
See above.
Research partitioning. Your image application will overwrite whatever
format you put on the system. You only need to make sure you have the
partitioning setup appropriately.
It could be the controller on your motherboard corrupting data when it reads and writes, but that's an off the wall thought. Unfortunately, black box repair is about the only solution. You might get a test utility from the manufacturer to run a drive test. I haven't seen a marginal drive in so long I'm not used to doing more than R&R. They normally die on me and its easy to know what to do.
.
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