[Dorito123]

Why would you need anything besides the Disk manager in windows? I think if you stay away from 3rd party software you will be ok. I'm not sure about your lost data because I can sit down in front of your computer but next time use windows disk management. You can use it to remove and add partitions and resize partitions. And it wont screw up. Good Luck! and I hope you can fix it!

 

[Superpredator]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dorito123 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Why would you need anything besides the Disk manager in windows? I think if you stay away from 3rd party software you will be ok. I'm not sure about your lost data because I can sit down in front of your computer but next time use windows disk management. You can use it to remove and add partitions and resize partitions. And it wont screw up. Good Luck! and I hope you can fix it!

Agreed. I recently reinstalled Vista to solve an obnoxious blue screen issue, but I had a 320 GB drive partitioned into two that I wanted unpartitioned. Since it was my system drive I simply ran Disk Management from the Vista DVD upon startup. I had the partition gone and the drive resized to normal in about 5 seconds.

 

[EnOYiN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dorito123 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Why would you need anything besides the Disk manager in windows? I think if you stay away from 3rd party software you will be ok. I'm not sure about your lost data because I can sit down in front of your computer but next time use windows disk management. You can use it to remove and add partitions and resize partitions. And it wont screw up. Good Luck! and I hope you can fix it!

I've had really bad experiences with the disk management of Windows. (all the versions) The main problem, as I see it, is that Windows does a lot of things automatically for you instead of you having to set such things yourself. (startsector/endsector, clustersize, etc) One thing in particular which went wrong for a lot of people is the conversion of a FAT to a NTFS with another clustersize. Whether you are using a proper tool for this or the disk management of Windows you will most likely loose the files which were originally on the partition.

So my advice would be to not mess with partitions after you've got them stuffed with files you can't afford to lose.

 

[Superpredator]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EnOYiN /img/forum/go_quote.gif I've had really bad experiences with the disk management of Windows. (all the versions) The main problem, as I see it, is that Windows does a lot of things automatically for you instead of you having to set such things yourself. (startsector/endsector, clustersize, etc) One thing in particular which went wrong for a lot of people is the conversion of a FAT to a NTFS with another clustersize. Whether you are using a proper tool for this or the disk management of Windows you will most likely loose the files which were originally on the partition. So my advice would be to not mess with partitions after you've got them stuffed with files you can't afford to lose.

I had major problems with disk managment in Windows prior to Vista. I've always preferred 3rd party software to their built-in Windows counterparts (Diskeeper over Windows defrag, etc.), and I was actually somewhat surprised that it worked so smoothly. Of course, I was eliminating a partition to simply format and reinstall, so I wasn't concerned about losing files and can't speak to that. I did notice that I couldn't run a full format from the installation disk, which means that half the drive was full formated before the whole thing was quick formated. If I encounter any problems I'll probably nab Disk Director and try again.

 

[Dorito123]

Best thing to do when switching file systems is to do a fresh install, kinda like when you upgrade your os from XP to Vista, a fresh install is best. I know its a pain but a fresh install fully updated and all new drivers maintained properly should last you a long time.

 

[EnOYiN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dorito123 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Best thing to do when switching file systems is to do a fresh install, kinda like when you upgrade your os from XP to Vista, a fresh install is best. I know its a pain but a fresh install fully updated and all new drivers maintained properly should last you a long time.

I am installing Windows XP on at least 4 machines a week so I must have a pretty painful life.

Aside from that it will be a long time before I'll start using Vista on servers etc. and because of rumours about Windows 7 and a competition of certain Linux distros I doubt I will.