Nice free “Windows” partition manager

[Abuilder]

Hmmmm.... Is right! I'd hate to see you blast it but in the same sense the mbr is not correct and could very well be causing these problems and should be fixed.
Are you good poker player? LOL

[MilesAhead]

Les, where are the bad sectors? On the free space? Give some details where you are now.

Do you still have free space or is it back to square one? What I'm thinking is if the free space has the bad spot you may be able to create a partition and run chkdsk /f on it without rebooting since it's not in use by anything. If that cleans up then you should be able to delete it and annex it.

Only thing that worries me is if you have stubborn bad sectors it might be trying to tell you to get another drive. But I'm not sure what you've tried so far.

[MilesAhead]

Oh, to answer your question somebody mentioned Ubuntu live CD has all those file and disk tools since it's a Linux live CD. I think I would take the approach of trying to get rid of the bad sectors before getting into the middle of anything else. Trouble with these partition manipulation things is if you get frustrated and push the button the next couple of days can suck. Hope you have a backup image.

[blutach]

Are you good poker player? LOL

Not good enough to stare down a message like that from Bill!

I thought all the bad sectors are gone now - chkdisk gave a Clean volume message.

The bad sectors are/were on the exisitng C drive, not free space. About 20% in. But, I don't wanna move any data; not one byte. Just extend the partition. You'd think there's a way, wouldn't you?

EDIT: And there is. That Paragon freeware product did it, within Windows in about 5 seconds, without moving any data! Thanks to all that helped!

Regards

[MilesAhead]

Glad you got it going. btw, not to be a nag, but if you don't have a backup image I'd recommend it. The Paragon Drive Backup Express does work. I use it to backup my Vista64. I bought the one on my Vista32 machine. To avoid giant backup images I move off big video files and other stuff to the external, do a defrag, then back up the image with the free Express 64 bit editon. Vista 64 is even bigger than Vista since it has that 32 bit compatibility stuff, so even with mostly nothing on my drive my backups are @40GB. Don't want to add video to that pile! I just copy stuff back after the backup is finished. It goes very smoothly.

[blutach]

It'll probably choke on the 3 bad sectors!!!!

The partition is about 10Gb, just Windows, Program Files and associated stuff in local settings and app data etc. My Documents is on the D drive, as are all media, the outlook data file (and even some program files).

I suppose I could make an image and store it on my desktop PC, which has oodles of space. Looks like I better get to know that Paragon product better.

Thanks for the tip!

Regards

[Abuilder]

Les
I know you probably don’t want to start messing around with that HD again but to tell you the truth if I had some of the errors that were reported by 2 out of 3 partition managers & the bad MBR coming straight from Mr. Bill I would be counting the days before the with that drive. If you back it up like Miles suggested and then start from scratch doing a low level format on the drive you may be able to clear up all those errors and have a clean slate to repartition and do a fresh install of windows on a bigger primary partition. If the low level or new windows install reports any errors then you know for sure that the drive is on it’s last leg and needs to be replaced for sure. That one error that sr6 reported is a dead giveaway that the disk has physical errors on it. Not good!
A new HD may be in order anyway. You can pickup a 120 Gb or bigger laptap HD really cheap these days.
/end nag

[blutach]

I'll think I'll make that image and store it and do that mate. TBH, we wouldn't be swapping drives in the laptop - it's about 5 or 6 y.o. and due for replacement. If that happens, then installation of the progs on the new PC is all that's needed.

Regards

[Abuilder]

it's about 5 or 6 y.o. And is way over due for replacement.

lol

[blutach]

But what do I care - it is Firey's laptop!!!!

Regards

[doctorhardware]

I just picked up a 250 gig for the wife's laptop at Tiger Direct for $89.99. I tried to image the 60 gig hard drive, it gave me BSOD. It suggest I should remove imaging software and defrag software and fix the problems on the hard drive.

[Abuilder]

Well the partition table on my 250GB Seagate went bonkers
I’m not sure if it was Partition Manager that corrupted it or not but just to be safe I edited my first post and deleted the link to it.
Les
When I started having problems with my drive I did what I suggested to you, use fixmbr. And damn did it make a mess out of my system. I went from 2 partitions of almost equal size to 5 of random size and seen as unknown partition type. So it’s probably a good thing you didn’t use it.

[MilesAhead]

Abuilder that FixMbr used to work a lot better in the past. The same sector of code was used for years on disk. But later on I guess there were variations. On Linux I remember the bootloader used to make a copy of the mbr and replaced it. The Paragon drive backup that I use lets you store the mbr and entire partition table. Nowadays it's better to use something that makes an actual copy and replaces it.

[Abuilder]

Miles
I had an almost full clone of the c: on the seagate so I didn't loose much. I think I will use grub on my Puppy Linux live-cd to make a copy of the mbr. Puppy is the only live-cd distro that lets you save files back onto the Live-cd.

[MilesAhead]

That's pretty cool. Now if I could only figure out how to make a Windows BootCD that booted Windows off the HD like Linux does! Now that comes in handy!