1 Topic by coffeemonster (edited by coffeemonster 2009-11-30 16:03:35)

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Topic: unallocated disk crashes XP

I've taken a 500Gb SATA drive from a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo and put it into an XP machine to use for data. Each time I run XP with this disk in order to format it, XP crashes (freezes). I used GParted Live on a cd to remove all the partitions then tried again. Windows disk manager shows the disk as unallocated, but when i try to format it the system crashes again. So, I tried creating a new partition table, same result, tried creating an NTFS primary partition on the disk, same result, and finally formatting the disk as NTFS in Gparted - and XP crashes again. I've also tried using EASEUS Partition Master instead of Windows Disk Manager and it crashes the system too, sometimes after loading sometimes before.

I realise this sounds like a problem with my system / drive but the weird thing is that after removing the partitions or creating a new partition table, when I ask Gparted to create a new NTFS partition or format the partition it claims to have completed these operations for a 500Gb disk in 3 or 5 seconds respectively. I'm a newbie but that doesn't seem quite right.

Any suggestions? (other than don't mess with stuff you obviously don't understand!)

Thanks.

2 Reply by gedakc

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Re: unallocated disk crashes XP

GParted does a quick format.  This is why it is fast.  smile

You could try zeroing out the drive first.  The command would look something like:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/path-to-the-disk-device-to-erase bs=512

This would take quite a long time on a 500 GB drive.

3 Reply by class413

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Re: unallocated disk crashes XP

[Moved to the Live Media section]

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

4 Reply by coffeemonster

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Re: unallocated disk crashes XP

Thanks for the suggestion gedakc, and apologies class413 for posting in the wrong forum.

I tried the disk in a newer vista system and managed to format and use the disk successfully. But when I transfer it back into my XP machine it still crashes. So I'm guessing it's an XP or BIOS issue, GParted is exonerated. However, I'm still stuck, so if anyone has any further suggestions ...

By way of further info the machine is running XP SP2 and has a 200Gb Sata150 drive which I had to partition when I installed it originally to  create a 137Gb partition, but I've since added a 160Gb IDE drive which works fine. The new 500Gb drive seems to work fine in GParted, so it looks like my Windows XP has a problem with new or large SATA disks and not IDE, or I guess it could be the drivers for this disk (Seagate ST31000528AS 7200.12)

5 Reply by class413

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Re: unallocated disk crashes XP

I don't know details on the function of this drive. Is any driver needed to make it work under xp? Any system update?
Any antivirus or firewall problem?

In any case, I would advice to submit the issue to the ReadyNAS support forum.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***