Re: The Magical Ghost Partition

On Wed, 03 Dec 2003 05:10:52 -0500, erimess wrote:

>aka What the hell's this computer doing?
>
>Well, not *this* computer.
>
>A friend of a friend dumped her old computer on me cause she got a new
>one and saw no need to have an old extra one lying about.  Personally,
>I can't understand that, but that's just me. :-)  (Even got the
>monitor.)

You can fix it up and sell it, if it's not too horribly old.

>I'm actually kinda excited cause a) I can put Win95 on it for that
>stuff that won't work on the really old computer with Win3.1 on it,
>and also won't work well with XP.  b) I can use the old scanner with
>it cause it takes an ISA slot.  Cool.  (Never mind that it's a Packard
>Bell.  Hey, it was free.  I was shocked my 95 found drivers for
>everything, cause her Recovery Disk has some, er, gouges in it.)
>
>It was supposedly busted, but this woman is such a complete illiterate
>that I can't trust a thing she says, including her translations from
>the shop she took it to, etc.  So far I've found the CD drive to have
>a problem, but everything else working OK *thus far*.  And I had
>another CD drive to use.
>
>Except for this slightly weird thing.  It has a ghost.  
>
>I discovered there was a second hard drive on it (a weird 5.25" thing
>I've never seen?) and it was all partioned up.  So after I installed

Quantum Bigfoot?  Quantum made those in a large format to enhance
drive cooling but they had some problem - I don't forget exactly what.

>Windows and did a few other things... suddenly it tries to tell me
>nothing is on the I partition -- the CD, just to discover it has
>created an I partition and the CD is now on J.  So where the hell did
>this partition come from?
>
>Furthermore, it's duplicating everything from the E partition.  I
>noticed it was the same size, and then when I installed something on E
>last night, it's also showing up as being on this I.  <Twilight Zone
>music>  It's showing up in Explorer in alphabetical order.  I went
>into fdisk for the hell of it, and it's showing as being on the 1st
>hard drive, right behind C.  And of course, there's not that much
>space on the 1st drive -- it can't really be there.  I have not
>actually tried to go to that partition and see if that program will
>run from there.  (Windows seems to *think* it's there.)

Strange.  I guess I would pull all the hardware, then install parts I
wanted to be in there.  It sounds a bit like a situation I came across
once where a machine (maybe a pb) had a harddrive made from two drives
that were physically joined together in a strange hardware striped
configuration.  I guess that was around 96 or 97.  So maybe removing
the extra drive and install w95 to the remaining one will work.

>I can't think of anything else important I did, cause this thing
>showed up not long after I installed Windows.  The only thing I
>might've done was format a couple more of the partitions.  Wait, I'm
>trying to think.  One of the partitions on the 2nd drive was primary,
>so I went in fdisk and re-partitioned it, and then of course the D
>drive moved.  I can't remember if that was before or after I installed
>Windows, but shouldn't have affected the 1st drive anyway.
>
>What would cause this, and how do I get rid of this extra partition
>that doesn't exist?  I thought about getting rid of it with fdisk.
>I've only installed one program, so I don't mind just wiping
>everything except the C drive.  I'm just not sure if I'll screw it up
>worse and maybe I should wipe everything and start over?  Is this an
>unusual thing or am I just now having the honor of seeing it for the
>first time?

Do you have a graphical partitioning tool like Partition Magic?
Sometimes seeing the partitions visually can explain what is
happening.

But still, I would remove the extra drive and start fresh.

-- 
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