Anyone ever install windows on a cpu w/ a large hard drive?

[CyberHippie]

I'm talking bigger than 129gb.

I've been able to get windows to see the full 200gb, but the machine is good for a couple of weeks then dies, the hard drive gets corrupt. It's making me crazy!!!

[Basher]

Sure have, no problems. Sounds like a flaky drive to me.

[can-o-phish]

You might want to try partioning the drive. If that doesn't work, then it could be a flaky drive or a thousand other things....

Good Luck!

[jonyak]

first of all the cpu is the actual chip inside the box.. you don;t install anything on it..

in my experience windows does not liek large drive volumes and you should partition your drive with a smaller 5-15gig partition for the operateing system alone.

that may work.

[SaggyBalls]

windows on a large, hard, what?

oh...drive...nope.

[timouse]

partition partition partition. when not if when windoze tanks, you'll have all your data on a separate drive, simply wipe C and start again.

[bouche]

if it's 2000, 2003, or XP you shouldn't have any problems with NTFS. Is it a new drive? I'm off to buy a large drive in the next week or so. My D drive is VERY flaky and stops spinning sometimes and windows freezes.

A 120 is about 80 bucks now...... yipeeeeee.

[headygouda]

PARTITION!! Always... I always keep the OS on a seperate partition and never use that drive for anything else but installing programs. I keep a seperate partition for downloading, FLACs and WAVs.

All 3 of my drives are 120 or larger and only one is not partitioned.

What do you mean when you say it gets 'corrupt'? Bad sectors? Can't fire up windows? Does it make any funny noises other than spinning..like a constant clicking sound?

I find bad drives show their signs early in their life. Every drive that I have ever had that's pooched on me has done it in the first week. I've had 2 drives do that. I think I've gone through about 10 drives since grade 6... those were the only 2 I ever had problems with.

[bouche]

i got a question. if your hard drive fries, does it fry one or all partitions?

If it fries all, I don't see the point for partitioning.

[CyberHippie]

Yeah I have to say I'm not such a big believer in Partitioning. I think it just creates more of a mess in the end. It's hard to plan your partitions properly, because what you think you might want today, a year from now might not work. Then your left with moving files here, there, and everywhere and then your left with multiple fragmented partitions, and your files all split up everywhich way. I'd rather keep it all in one piece. Plus there's already another 80gb drive on the system, so that's where back-ups and whatnot go.

I think the problem I was having may have been due to me messing up the install in the first place. When I installed the 1st time, I didn't know about the 129gb limitation and ended up converting the drive to a dynamic drive. Applied the windows registry patch, created a partition and formatted the unused space. Then I tried to merge the partitions. Now... You cannot merge partitions on a dynamic disk, that is the system boot drive. So... I reinstalled windows, this time the windows installer saw the full 200gb. But I'm thinking what I esentially did was fool windows into allowing me to merge partitions on a dynamic drive, when it shouldn't have let me, which resulted in the unstable system... At least that's one theory anyhow...

Last night I used the maxtor powermax utility to do a low level format, and write zero's to the whole drive.

On my next windows install it once again only saw 129gb, at least now I'm back to square one and can follow the proper steps. So once windows was isntalled I applied the 48-bit LBA registry patch. Now I can see the extra 70 gigs. I ran the windows diskpart.exe program to extent the primary partition to use up the unallocated 70gigs and bam, I'm back up to the full 200gb. But I think I did it properly this time and I'm crossing my fingers that everything will be solid this go. I'm gonna test the drive by filling it with data, deleting the data and filling it again. Then if all goes well send the machine back to my friend, and if I ever see it again I can't be held responsible for my actions...

ARghg!

Aren't ya glad you read this?

[headygouda]

How can partitioning possible be more messy? Its like saying your house would be more messy if you had no walls... well, at least there is some order to my disorder when I have rooms!

The purpose of partitioning, for the sake of keeping your operating system on a seperate area is for the system to run faster. If you have multiple drives and the system is on one and downloads and such go to another, then thats fine. But that is basically a 'physical partition' in itself.

When you defragment, your computer will move frequently accessed files around and essential 'fragment' your operating system since it's on othe same partition, and you don't use all the files as frequently. By keeping a seperate small partition exclusively for programs and the OS, you will never have to defrag that partition and things will stay put.

If I have 10 bit torrents running (and I usually do) and have them saving on the same HD as my OS, my computer will slow to a halt because its writing data as fast as possible and needs to 'pause' so it can retrieve some files to open a program... Anyway, I'm not trying to convert a non-believer, everyone has their own pref to their PC setup.

trev- your problem is that your tried to merge partitions. Some programs are better for this but personally, I stay away from all that. I set it and leave it and never have issues of having to move files here and there. But I also have 400+ gigs to work with on 4 drives and 6 partitions.

I also rarely have single files >40gigs (like raw video) so I never run into the problem of having too small a partition.

Have you tried something like partition magic?

I still don't know what you mean by 'corrupt' drive. What happens when your drive/system gets pooched?!? Nothing boots?

[CyberHippie]

re: corrupt drive

Both times it happened my friend was either copying files or downloading files, so either way writing to the harddrive. Then he'd get an error writing to the c drive saying it was corrupt. Upon rebooting, after the memory check screen it would just go to a black screen saying "error loading operating system". The boot sector was corrupt. I tried doing various things from the windows repair console like fixboot and fixmbr, but each step would only let me get a tiny bit futher into booting windows. It appears as though the drive was all messed up and couldn't read any files. I went through all the repair stuff with my Emergency Repair Disk. But that still got me nowhere.

I hear what your saying about partitioning. I did try that stragetgy of having a small space for the OS and system stuff. But I found that I eventually ran out of space and packed it too tight, as I installed more and more programs over the months, and was forced to start installing things to the D drive, which can be a bit flakey. Obviously the strategy is to give yourself enough space on the system partition so that won't happen, but how much is enough space?

[bouche]

If I have 10 bit torrents running (and I usually do) and have them saving on the same HD as my OS, my computer will slow to a halt because its writing data as fast as possible and needs to 'pause' so it can retrieve some files to open a program...

Now THAT's a solid reason. I'd like to see that actually work though. I'm probably going to redo my pc soon. I do it once a year so before the time my my drive would be all fragmented to hell, I start from scratch.