Can i hide my 1st partition and then make my second partition the system partition

Discussion in 'Software' started by zr79, Dec 13, 2009.

  1. zr79

    zr79 Byte Poster

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    I have 2 partitions c: and d:, windows xp is installed onto the d: partition "yes d:" and all that is on c: are boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com, so hence c: is the system part with a mbr and d: is the boot partition with the OS , I had to do this as basically i have a lot of bad sector at the start of my HD and the XP install gave errors when half way through installing XP so i created a 2nd partition and XP installed fine onto this 2nd partition, but the mbr is still written to the c: partition.

    Now i thought i could maybe hide the first partition, copy boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com to the d: partition and then write a new mbr to the d: part making it the system part and also boot partition.....
     
    Last edited: Dec 13, 2009
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  2. Johnd76

    Johnd76 Megabyte Poster

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    why not delete both partitons and have one partition, do a full format not a quick format and it should work fine
     
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  3. zr79

    zr79 Byte Poster

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    I have done 3 full formats and a various chkdsks. I have run the WD lifeguard tools and the low level format will not work as it says the drive has to many errors, and the smart status is failing at "reallocated sector count" which means that there are too many bad(or unuseable) sectors that have had to be remapped to reserved sectors, i was about to throw the drive out then i created a second partition, with the first part about 30gigs, and i have no problems on the second part, would be a shame to waste the drive. So somewhere in that first 30gigs the disk is too damaged to use.

    I basically want to make the D: the C:, as i want to take an image of XP but include the mbr in that image aand currently D: has no boot files.
     
    Last edited: Dec 14, 2009
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  4. UKDarkstar
    Honorary Member

    UKDarkstar Terabyte Poster

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    Uh, really sounds like you need to replace the drive m8. Partitioning isn't really going to help if it's starting to come up with loads of errors - it's on it's way out and shouldn't be relied on. Drives are cheap enough these days.
     
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  5. zr79

    zr79 Byte Poster

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    I get what you are saying, the thing is, it is running very smooth on this second partition, so why not just use it till something happens, i didn't realise you could have a bad part of a disk, and hence if you partition the disk you can work out what areas of the disk to avoid, could come in very usefull.
     
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  6. UKDarkstar
    Honorary Member

    UKDarkstar Terabyte Poster

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    Nope, I disagree. Def not recommended practice. If I'd have caught any of my engineers doing that they'd be out the door ! :p
     
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  7. danielno8

    danielno8 Gigabyte Poster

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    It's just not worth the faffing about given the price of a new hard drive. As soon as a drive starts showing problems i'd be getting rid.
     
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  8. dmarsh
    Honorary Member 500 Likes Award

    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    Agreed, what happens when the drive totally dies during an important operation or between backups ? £50 on a new drive is nothing to have a working system.
     
    Last edited: Dec 14, 2009

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