woops... advice ?

[zombie@computer]

OK, so heres the deal

disk1 (sata):
C 40 gb Win Xp
D 700gb Media files

Was totally loving windows 7 (installed on an old IDE disk), but, it was horribly slow on there. So i had a bright idea: move the partition to disk1. Well, easier said than done. Resizing D took a while, but eventually i had this

disk1 (sata):
C 40 gb Win Xp
D 640 gb Media files
E 40 gb Win 7

Notice the missing 20 gigs? Thats on purpose. Well, i though, might as well install ubuntu here as well. It was horribly slow on a VM and i needed it for some proggys.

Now heres the kicker: right when ubuntu was creating its partition, god decided to give me a nice big poweroutage. I feared it, you guessed it. Ubuntu suddenly only found C. D and E were missing...
Restarted in windows XP, whaddaya know. C was there, D was there. Hell, even E was there...

Fuck this partitioning, im gonna reclaim those 20 gigs! so, on to partition magic, which greeted me with this message:

"You pwnd your partition table. Now go STFU."

It enforced this message by displaying a yellow square around my primary disk, not showing ANY partitions, and writing the word "bad" inside. Complemented by a nice big n bold exclamation mark.
Sh... Well, atleast windows is working...

...Barely, i noticed. Windows started, i could explore all partitions with ease, but no programs would start. Firefox was lying in the gutter, bleeding. The explorer shell would crash and burn on allmost every mouseclick. Chkdsk crashed on trying to check any partitions. Disk manager (windows) crashed before loading. What the hell was going on ???

Several crashes and restarts later i retried windows 7. Everything was working 100% there. Even chkdsk worked, i used it to scan for any errors and fix them as well. I didnt think it found any, but still, i retried windows xp.

This time, windows xp was running okay again. Fast, no crashes. Chkdsk working again, diskmanager showed my partitions okay. The only odd thing so far ive discovered is the fact that the tabpage of my mouse isnt displaying anymore in Setpoint (mouse driver thingy), causing my tilt left and tilt right button to stop working all of a sudden(as if the drivers vanished... ). For the rest, all my files seem fine. Partition magic is still nagging about my bad disk tho, even tho chkdsk shows no errors whatsoever.

So, long story short: bad partitions or not? What do you think? Any advice on a next step?
Its not REALLY bad if i loose everything on these disks (got backups from before i started), but i dont have enough room for all of the 600 gigs of media files (backed up my favorites). Still, id hate to move around those amounts of data 'just to be sure'.

[xoqolatl]

Try using diskmgmt.msc (in command line or search box) in Windows 7. If it works, resize affected partitions a bit to enforce recreation of the partition table. If that doesn't help, I don't know...

[zombie@computer]

in the mean time i bought a new hdd (raptor, yay!) for my os's, so i can empty this hdd and start all over.
I hope thatll speed up windozzes and ubuntu as well

Maybe a bit much but i realised my disks were getting full and i like to backup atleast my audio, documents and windows disks, so some extra room wouldn't be too bad. Besides, i found a store where i could add another 2 gig of ram for €19.95 (ram i payed over €100 for barely two years ago).

So all in all, it was a good thing i guess.

[cdxx]

I think you're on the right track with the new drive keeping your os on a separate disk, that's just good practice. Keep your data on the 700 but I'd wipe that puppy clean and lose the partitions and start over (you mentioned you had a backup)

You might be fine now but if your partition tables are screwy then you might get blindsided one day by sitting down at your computer to only realize that all your data is gone. (that happened to me and it sounds like it happened to you too) anyway, it was the master boot record, somehow it got corrupt. I ended up restoring it via software, and vola! all my data was back.

I ended up starting over and reloading my data from backup just to be sure. I haven't had any problems since.

and forget partition magic. I've heard horror stories of it seriously screwing peoples hard drive.

[windlab]

Forget about Partition Magic, it's worse than useless.
A useful combination is Parted Magic (Linux Distro), and Hiren's boot disk, created by a long time bit-tech.net member.
...And for a corrupted MBR, use FixMBR on the Windows disk.

[cdxx]

I love hiren's. i use that disk on a weekly basis at work (sys admin). just a word to the wise for anyone not familiar will all the tools on it; be careful. in the wrong hands, that disc can really eff things up.

[zombie@computer]

ok, so i insert 2 gb, making up 4 gigs in total, bios nor windows recognises more than 2.81 gb. wtf ? its exactly the same ram (same brand, same specs, same serial number, even though they are shaped differently).

goddamn, nothing works straight out of the box.

[whiffen]

You need a 64 bit operating system to have more than 3gb of memory.

Also windows 7 allocates some HDD space and makes a separates partition from C that's hidden. Its 100MB in size.

Windows also recognizes the closest rounded up number for HDD storage as far as I'm aware. Like if you buy a 1 TB HD you might expect to have 1024 GB. This is not the case and you will probably have more like 950 GB.

[zombie@computer]

You need a 64 bit operating system to have more than 3gb of memory.

Also windows 7 allocates some HDD space and makes a separates partition from C that's hidden. Its 100MB in size.

Windows also recognizes the closest rounded up number for HDD storage as far as I'm aware. Like if you buy a 1 TB HD you might expect to have 1024 GB. This is not the case and you will probably have more like 950 GB.

i just said the bios didnt recognise it either. And 2.8 out of 4 is a little too few, dont you think?

Anyway, ive been experimenting, old one out, new one in, again, again and again.

two new memory in dual channel -> 2048
two old memory in dual channel -> 2048
two new in dual channel + one (or two) in single channel : 2880
two new in dual channel + one old in single channel: fucking thing wont even boot.

So, its not the slots (each can channel 1024). Its not the dims. So it must be the combination. Which is odd, all four sticks are EXACTLY the same (kingston ddr2 something dimm). The only difference is that the old ram was 16*64mb and the new one is 8*128. (which is odd, the id's of both products are the same as well)

tbh

im quite stumped

EDIT: during startup, bios should say 4 gb, no matter what bit OS, right? or is that just for 64 bit cpu's?
it was to my understanding that the 32 bit thing just meant less ram for windows, but eg linus should be able to address the four gigabytes

EDIT 2: ENABLE MEMORY REMAP. An option i have never heard of, but which apparently is turned off by default. The bios will never assign more than the 32 bit max unless you enable this option (it basically tells the bios it can share memory adresses between devices and the ram

Still thanks whiffen, without you i would have never thought of the 32 bit problem thingy.

[Mess]

32bit OS's still recognise the RAM, but only use 3GB of it... weird that it's only recognising such a weird figure as 2.8...

[cdxx]

weird... did you check to see if there's a new firmware for you mobo? I'd update it, there maybe a bug there...

the 4gb should show during the post and bios. any 32bit windows desktop os will see 3.25 of 4gb.

check out total physical memory. 3405364K = 3.25GB

[zombie@computer]

weird... did you check to see if there's a new firmware for you mobo? I'd update it, there maybe a bug there...

the 4gb should show during the post and bios. any 32bit windows desktop os will see 3.25 of 4gb.

check out total physical memory. 3405364K = 3.25GB

ah, well, problem has been solved using the enable memory remapping. Though im not getting 3.25 gb...

[cdxx]

what's it showing? 3 ?

[zombie@computer]

what's it showing? 3 ?

win 7 says

4.00 gb (2.00 gb availble)

xp just says 2.00 gb available

bios says 4096 mb ok

[xoqolatl]

32-bit OS has an address space of 4096 MB. In this address space it must include video card memory, BIOS, memory of various PCI-E (PCI) devices like RAID controllers, PCI-E devices configuration space, even CPU and memory controller configuration space. What is left is seen in Task Manager and used by programs. Thus every rig with more than 4 GB total memory and a 32-bit OS will have different size available in OS. It's usally around 3,25 GB because most PCs have a 512 MB video card and the rest is used by motherboard and other devices. However, if you have a video card with 1 GB of memory, your Task Manager would show less than 3 GB available memory.