New vista install, big hdd partition/formatting probs

ruiner_066

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Hello,

I just got my invitation through the tech beta nomination thread (thanks netryder) and attempted an installation. I have 2, 60gb sata hdds in a raid0 for a total of 120 gb. I used partition magic to move things around so that i had..

partition1(primary)- C: 90gb, used for storage
partition2(extended)- D: 15gb, has XP running on it
partition3(extended)- E: 15gb, new partition for vista

Seemed to work fine, but a few minutes into the installation I got an error 80070570. From the bug reports people seem to think this is caused by a corrupt dvd. I exited, booted back into windows, reburned the dvd. At this point all hdd partitions, etc. seemed just fine, all were accessible, everything in disk management looks good.

Then I booted from the dvd again to try to install. I decided to format the new partition (E:) just to have a clean start. The formatting failed. I deleted the partition & created a new partition. Tried to format it, no go.

Rebooted back into XP. Now E: is inaccessible through windows explorer. When I try to format it, it looks like it's working, but when it's almost done it fails. So I open up disk management & wtf? I have hundreds of gigs of unpartitioned space & "unknown partitions", plus my E: now reads as 811 GB. (this is still on the 120gb raid0 array)

The C & D drives seem totally unaffected, I am running XP off the D drive now with no problems. Can anyone point me in the right direction? or .... any direction? i've been messing around with it for a while now & am getting frustrated because nothing i've tried is able to change the partitions or format them.

Attached is a pic of my disk management right now...

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: Here is another pic of partitionmagic's partitioninfo. Partitionmagic will no longer open(has an error reading the disk when I open it). However this utility would still work.
 

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No suggestions? It now seems that after letting it sit overnight, my XP installation no longer boots, which is strange because it worked fine after several reboots. I can no longer access any part of the disk from any recovery tool =(. At this point I would just be happy to be able to grab some data off the disk- I did back up my important stuff, I just have some media, etc. that would be nice to keep.
The only thing I can think of doing is using the raid bios to break it & recreate it (not even sure if that would work) but like i said....I'd rather not.
 
Ouch. Sorry to hear that man. I've never tried working with the Vista betas on a RAID setup, so I'm afraid I can't really be of much help here.
I hope you had most of your stuff backed up safely though! :)
 
It looks like I'll be able to recover the files i did not have backed up using ERD Commander. Now I'm just trying to decide where to go from here. I'm thinking about splitting up the disks & not using raid any more- it would totally suck to get everything set up again & have the same thing happen. I'm thinking of using 1 of the 60gb drives for storage, and the other will partition up for either dual booting xp & vista, or triple booting xp, vista & linux (this shouldn't be a prob, right? =/ ) ALthough it would be nice to have vista on a completely different disk. If only I wasnt so darn poor I could buy more hdds =P
 
Wow - I didn't know it was possible to screw up a partition table that bad :O . Basically what has happened is Vista obviously had some (rather large) bug in the formatting / creating partition area, and it has written incorrect values for sizes of partitions etc. Why XP booted then stopped booting is most likely unexplainable. You should be able to recover your data with some more advanced apps, since its only your partition table information that is jumbled, rather than the actual data.

Breaking up your raid array would be a good idea, but you will lose quite a bit of performance, especially in the disk-hungry Vista. Strangely, my onboard VIA Raid controller worked fine in RAID0 mode with 2x160gb maxtors, but in normal SATA mode it wasn't recognised.

If you do go for RAID0 mode, i suggest having a small C for XP, small D for Vista, and then the rest E for your files. I currently have an 80gb C for XP, and 200gb D for storage, which im gonna install Build 5365 on. I'll keep you posted :)
 

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Also Hi EP and people. I found this place again while looking through a oooollllllldddd backup. I have filled over 10TB and was looking at my collection of antiques. Any bids on the 500Mhz Win 95 fix?
Any of the SP crew still out there?
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Impressed you have kept this alive this long EP! So many sites have come and gone. :(

Just did some crude math and I apparently joined almost 18yrs ago, how is that possible???
hello peeps... is been some time since i last came here.
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