Hard Drive Problem - *HELP*!

General Questions
#1

My Windows XP desperately needed reinstallation because it was crapping out. Because of work I was doing there was little hard drive space available and to back it up would have taken TONS of DVDs.

I bought a Maxtor 250 GB Ultra ATA drive.

I partitioned and formatted the drive using Partition Magic and then transferred about 170 GB to the new drive.

So, I then formatted and reinstalled XP with SP1 to the C: drive and installed all of the updates to get to the level I had been at previously.

While the drive is seen in the device manager it is not seen in My Computer.

I reinstalled Partition Magic and the error message it gives me is:
Error #90
EZ-Drive has been detected on drive 2, but EZ-Drive is corrupt. Run the EZ-Drive setup diskette to correct this problem. For EZ-Drive support contact your EZ-Drive provider.

I didn’t use EZ-Drive, I used Partition Magic.

My system is a 2.6 ghz Athelon on an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe motherboard with the latest BIOS and drivers, with 3 quarters of a gig of memory.

I’ve already installed Maxtor’s driver to support drives larger than 127 GB.

All updates to XP have been installed.

I don’t want to lose my data. This is what I was trying to avoid.

#2

Likely PM copied the EZ-drive boot sector / loader from your old drive to your new drive.

The situation is not unrecoverable.

Re-image your old drive from the new drive with PM. This will put you back in your original state. Check thoroughly!

Repartition and reformat the new drive using XP. Remove the original drive and set the new HDD as your primary.

NB if your motherboard supports RAID 0 (mirrorring), do consider buying another 250 GB drive and setting up a mirror set.

Boot off the XP CD and install XP on the new HDD.

Install the old HDD as a secondary drive and copy off your data and reinstall your apps.

Once finished, remove the old HDD and store it somewhere safe, just in case. After a month or so, you should be confident that all is well and you can bring out the old HDD and wipe it.

#3

When you installed the secondary drive, did you adjust the jumpers to set it as a secondary and not a primary?

That’s my only guess…sorry.

#4

Yes, the jumpers are set correctly. If they weren’t I’d never have been able to partition and format the drive to begin with.

#5

qts: With the error I mentioned in the OP that Partition Magic comes up with, it refuses to load after it gives the error message.

#6

Quick reply:

First of all, Partition Magic is some piece of crap, if ever get your data back you should throw if away. If you have XP you don’t need it anyway.

Second, EZ-Drive is a HDD manager from Western Digital to allow for large capacity drives. Maxtor and others have similar utilities. Partition Magic may have gotten confused about them OR you installed Partition Magic BEFORE the HDD manager got installed.

You wrote that you can see the drive in Device Manager but not in My Computer. Exactly what messages do you get from XP’s disk management tool?

Anyway, there may be several solutions:

  1. Did you change the jumpers so that you have correct master/slave settings?

  2. Can you read the capacity of your disk? If it’s 32GB or 166GB (?) your OS don’t see the whole disk yet. If so, your bios or large drives support isn’t working.

  3. Did you partition the drive as a primary partition or an extended partition? At least in Win2000 you can only have 4 primary partitions or 3 primaries and 1 extended. If both disks are primary, you can only have one of them active at a time.

I’m sure others will jump in with their solutions also.

#7

Oh, I see other have already jumped in. Nevermind.

I forgot to mention that I’m pretty sure it’s Partition Magic that’s the problem, but you should start from scratch so you don’t destroy anyting, hopefully the tables are intact.

#8

With Partition Magic, you should be able to create a bootable DOS floppy that will allow you to re-image.

#9

I don’t have a floppy drive on my desktop and like I said, because of the error I can’t even get PM to load.

#10

Sorry for missing this, but is the PM CD bootable?

#11

I second Alien’s suggeestion. Run away from PM as fast as you can. They might have had a good product in the DOS days, but it sure as heck is NOT reliable now. Quit messing with PM before you render both drives unusable.

#12

If at least one of the drives is a Maxtor, you can use Maxtor’s Maxblast software to re-image. You’ll need to put it on a bootable CD.

#13

PM in it’s various iterations has always worked geat for me.

See this note on ezdrive issues with PM

It indicates there is a method for determining is EZ drive is installed (or was ever installed)
This other messageboard note very similar to your scenario indicates that creation of defective partition (incorrectly ID’d by PM as an EZdrive error) may be (oddly) related to RAM timing issues.