Moving XP

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Partition Magic says something about chs being one number on one area, and another number in 2 other areas. If I allow Partition Magic to fix the problem, the drive is useless everywhere. If I tell it to not repair the discrepancy, the error code is 117, and it says the drive is bad

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So that tells you (well me & I'll tell you :D) the original format was probably not done right or by some non standard thing like pm ! there's all that cyclinder boundaries & stuff I always quote, but I'm never sure how to explain in two sentences - Quite often this can be reason for a repair install going wrong anyway, so I'll still spit on Hp, as I bet they did it in the first place ;)

btw - I've never found a practical way to fix it up other than exactly what you are finding yourself doing now ;)

For grins, (and what's another hour or two), we took a blank drive and used Hp recovery disks, (all eight of them), installed everything just like out of the box. Shut it down, put it in another box, and Partition Magic said the same thing. So it appears they are doing something to the formatting. I remember Western Digital or Maxtor? doing something similar, where the sector 63 offset was used. I think then it was like a drive overlay to help the bios detect the whole drive.

Who says education isn't expensive?https://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gifhttps://forums.windrivers.com/images.../2005/03/1.gif

And thanks to all who tried to help.

This is what you get for using images :p instead of formatting 'properly' & doing it the hard way, so I spit yet more on Hpoohey :D

I keep finding myself saying that imaging tools are not always the tool for the job & I think this is a classic example of how someone else not understanding can cause 'unforseen' troubles .. so a techo wotpp :D

Get a run of say 60gb disks & format them & watch what happens, if you've got a decent span of disks (so not all from the same production run) then you'll find when formatted they all come out slightly different in capacity terms - overlay that with a standard image (complete of course with its own MFT & bootsector based on the images size & NOT the disks real size) & hey presto you are as dumb as the bloke at hp ;)

Its all to do with calculating physical cyclinder boundaries for the logical offsets to work, one must start the disk & one must fall at the end of the disk (& then work out the others in between) - put an image on it & you transfer the mft & MBR from the image to the disk - errr wrong ! you don't want that at all, unless you fix it first, some stuff can do this right & some stuff can't & some can do it right for some file systems & some can't (they all got better btw - they are on to this but not perfect yet & older copies are worse for this).

This about logical vs physical disk geography refers

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So it appears they are doing something to the formatting

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IMO all that lot above answers what they are doing wrong, using crap imaging tools :D & effectively not getting the formatting right at all :thumbs: