Re: NTFS formatting
My experience with the NTFS disc is recounted here:
http://www.rusiczki.net/blog/archives/2006/11/10/check_disk_headaches
and
http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/wind...Windows-reinstall--Deleting-Orphan-Files.html
In the sequence of events leading up to this:
I wanted to start a regimented backup of my personal files (letters,
spread sheets, music and video, etc.) as well as create an image of my boot
disc. I was having trouble initiating the programs to do so, and my XP SP2
was running slowly. I had the remarkable thought that I should also check
for any Windows updates before I started. Lo and behold, SP3 was available,
and I thought "Why not?" I briefly read through the requirements and
warnings and felt safe in doing the upgrade.
I was unable to sit through the install, and when I came back my pc was
just rebooting. But what it was really doing was rebooting and rebooting --
getting to the splash screen, going black, pausing, and then back to
rebooting. Using my laptop and Google, I found that others had had the same
experience and that I had probably installed the Beta instead of the Final
version. I turned off the pc, removed my disc (250Gb, NTFS single
partition) and rigged it into an external drive enclosure and patched it
into my laptop (Win Vista) with USB. My files were still all there, just my
OS was hammered. I immediately copied the files I needed at the moment and
left the rest for later. I bought another 250Gb disc for my desktop pc and
formatted it to the limit allowed (I don't remember how I did this -- I
think I booted from my old XP OS disc and allowed it to format the drive).
Forgetting that my old version of XP might not handle discs as big as 250
Gb, I plugged my original disc into the USB port; I could still see all my
files but I could not copy them because of "permissions." Since I had gone
through that with my laptop and granted permissions to everything on the
disc, I thought I could do it faster if I installed the disc as a slave to
the IDE cable. Somewhere during this process, my power company momentarily
turned off the power (they were working on all the poles along my road,
upgrading their wires and as each transformer was hooked in they would
interrupt the power for 5 - 10 seconds without telling anyone). During
reboot, chkdsk notified me that it was checking my "new" drive for errors,
and that's when I began getting the messages that others have commented on.
And it was during the several hours of "...deleting orphan files..." and
"Inserting an index entry into $0 of file 25," except mine said "file
18301," followed by other messages such as "...replacing invalid security
ids." Unlike some of the others I decided to let chkdsk finish, because I
realized that my old XP disc would not recognize the larger harddrive
format. After chkdsk was finished I used Windows Explorer to look at the
files on my old drive. It was filled at about the capacity it had been
before all this -- about 118Gb out of the 250, but only a handful of dll
files and one jpeg were reported -- about less than 1Mb total -- no
directory folders.
I shut down the pc, removed my old harddrive, and put it on the shelf,
where it remains until I have the nerve to do more. I have successfully
upgraded my current drive to XP SP3. What I need to know is: how can I be
sure that my OS will now recognize and format drives in one partition above
137Gb? Where would I look? Can I just take it at face value that
everything is now in place, because if I reinstall my old drive as a slave,
I expect chkdsk will take over and either correct the problem or notify me
that my disc is irrecoverably corrupt and will have to be reformatted. I'm
afraid if anything is written to the disc, or the file table is further
messed with, I will lose important files that may now be recoverable.
Please read the postings on
http://www.rusiczki.net/blog/archives/2006/11/10/check_disk_headaches
because they indicate that miracles evidently do happen in the pc world.
I have further, much shorter, responses to your questions below...
"Shenan Stanley" <newshelper@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:OcEpqbB5IHA.1428@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
> Jark wrote:
>> When (in which version or upgrade or SP) did WinXP support NTFS
>> harddrive formatting for drive capacities above 132Gb?
>
> SP1.
When I reloaded XP from my original disc and allowed it to format my new
drive, I thought it had formatted it in FAT32 but when I look at it now
(after upgrading to SP3) it says it's in NTFS, but at the limit available in
pre-SP2.
>> ... But I see from online message sessions that others
>> have had the very same problems and have been able to recover
>> almost all of their old harddrive files, even after the hours-long
>> FAT revisions.
>
> I am unsure what you are talking about - but if your Windows XP CD was
> pre-SP1, it would not be able to format the drive larger than a given size
> as it did not support that. Your previous installation and how updated
> you kept it has no bearing on your CD.
>
And I have long realized that, but the slip-streaming procedure introduced
maybe two or more years ago did not work well for me, and the subsequent
disc failed. At the time, updates and upgrades were coming at me on a
once-per-week basis, and I felt that trying again to generate such a disc
would just be an exercise in futility.
>
> These "FAT" errors you are speaking of - I still go with 'I have no idea
> what you are talking about'... Can you be more descriptive?
>
Perhaps "FAT" is no longer applicable, though I'm sure there must be a table
of file locations similar to that old term. But the errors are those that
are described above, generated by the CHKDSK procedure. The gleaming light
is that, despite the reallocation of sector locations for all the files to
fit within the interpreted capacity of the drive were apparently "recovered"
when the appropriate upgrade was applied to XP. Mysterious, in my thinking,
but something that gives me hope.
Sorry for the length of this posting, but I'm looking for genius MVP's who
can give me better answers or more of those people who have experienced this
same problem. I hope you're one of them...
Jark