Problems with laptop hard drives

[holyford86]

I've got an HP DV9008NR laptop, its an older model but it holds two hard disks, I have 2 500Gb Western Digital Caviar Blue 5400rpm SATA drives in it at the present time. Every time that windows (XP media center) updates itself, it drops the secondary drive, it can't see it, and I can restart it over and over again, same result.
My bios recognizes that the drive is there and so does a third party partitioning program I use. if I go into this third party program it shows me the primary partition (465.76 Gb) and it also shows me 1582.24 Gb of unallocated space, keep in mind that this is a 500Gb drive. everything about the primary partition is correct, it will give me a file listing of everything in it, which is correct as well. If I set the partition as active within the software then restart the comp it's fine until windows updates itself again...
Any Ideas on how I can remedy this?

 

[AllanD]

1582.24 Gb of unallocated space?

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[holyford86]

1582.24 Gb of unallocated space?

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yeah.... it doesn't make sense to me either

 

[AllanD]

Getting something weird like that would make me think seriously about reaching for my OS install disc...

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[holyford86]

Getting something weird like that would make me think seriously about reaching for my OS install disc...

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it's always the secondary drive though, i'm on the laptop right now and the drive isn't registering, the os works flawlessly and it's been reinstalled within the past year. no bugs at all otherwise...

 

[Surrey]

Its running XP, so I assume the laptop is a few years old?
I find that laptops in general have a tendency to not work how you want them to, especially if you reinstall the OS

 

[holyford86]

Its running XP, so I assume the laptop is a few years old?
I find that laptops in general have a tendency to not work how you want them to, especially if you reinstall the OS

I migrated the recovery partition to my new hd and reinstalled the os that way when I swapped drives, so its an hp copy that's original to the machine. it's been updated to sp3 as well. This machine was bought in the time period that you could get xp or vista(shudder) and has a sticker that says designed for xp, vista compatible. It's more than speedy enough for what I do.

 

[AllanD]

You could copy the data elsewhere (external drive) Delete the partition, format the drive and then copy the data back to it and see if that helps...


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[Surrey]

I migrated the recovery partition to my new hd and reinstalled the os that way when I swapped drives, so its an hp copy that's original to the machine. it's been updated to sp3 as well. This machine was bought in the time period that you could get xp or vista(shudder) and has a sticker that says designed for xp, vista compatible. It's more than speedy enough for what I do.

Yeah, I have owned two laptops, and both seem to be a pain in the arse once you reformat or reinstall. I think its because of all the onboard stuff tied into the motherboard and shit, always had problems with USB ports, wireless, and hooking up an external monitor, among other things...

If you have two hard drives, have you tried using the other one as the main drive?

 

[martin]

I know this is not the answer you're looking for and I can imagine the flaming I'll get for even suggesting it but 'turn off windows update'. I've been chasing a similar problem for a couple of years now on the boss's laptop. Every time windows would update it would cause the system to crash and then refuse to boot. It also has xp media edition on it, so I have to wonder if the problem might be a quirk that is related to this version of the os.

 

[AllanD]

I find the best "recovery partition" (Best as-in "only one worth even considering bothering with") is to have a CLONED copy of your OS drive sitting in a desk drawer.

My notebook has one HDD, but I have an identical WD 320gb drive
that's a recent cloned copy of the one that's in the computer
differing only in recent M$ updates and the latest e-mail contents
(e-main is backed-up to a thumb drive daily)

Frankly a software "recovery partition" never restores things to exactly the way they were and never does it as fast as my method "recovers" from a drive failure.

On my notebook it takes two little phillips screws to swap out the drive caddy
On my desktop it takes turning a key and yanking out the drive drawer and
shoving the spare into place

I've dealt with enough crashes to have little patience for the "recovery process"

Balanced against even half an hour of my time a $45 320gb SATA notebook HDD is a bargain...

OTOH the 320gb IDE drive in my "spare" notebook (an older HP nc6220) is $90 to replace
so the backup for that is on a cheaper USB drive.a yes, that notebook allows booting
from a USB external HDD

BTW, for anyone who is interested Newegg has the WD 320gb "Scorpio Black" Notebook drive onsale with a $10 off promo code so instead of $59 for a 7200rpm notebook drive with a FIVE year warantee it's $49.

Makes it hardly worth it to spend $46 on the 5400rpm drive with the three year warantee...

sale runs until the 24th.

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[AllanD]

FACTORY restore partitions restore the computer to a state that most people simply don't want to be in....

add to that the fact that the typical "factory restore partition" will fail to recognize the size of the hard drive it's installed on and will usually "Restore to the size of the original factory drive.

I intentionally deleted my own because I didn't think a factory restore to Vista Home Basic on a 160gb drive was particularly useful on my Win7 system on a 500GB WD BLACK drive...

I'd never "migrate" a recovery or restore, partition, if you feel more
comfortable having one make a new one.

On my notebook I gave my 18Gb OS install 74gb to play in (when you have a 500gb drive...) and of that I allocated 20gb to system retore (Again, when you have a 500gb drive in a notebook...)

Try downloading and installing (or reinstalling) the storage controller driver from HP Support.

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[Charles]

Sounds like Windows XP is marking the second drives partition as "active"


Does this PC have FireWire 1384? If so, try disabling it. If you are not using firewire then you won't miss it.

 

[AllanD]

that wouldn't cause Windows to balk...

Windows accepts ONE "active" partition on each physical drive

It sounds more like an issue with the "storage controller driver"

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