Last cluster on Drive C

[WildTech]

Hi gang

I recently installed a new hard drive in a system for a client. The system is on a network and is very basic. Vid card and nic card are all thats installed and it is a point of sale machine that runs the software off the server. When the old 4.3 WD hard drive went nipples up, I Ghosted it over to a new 10.2 WD (smallest I had in stock) and everything was ducky. The machine ran perfectly with no errors for 6 monthes.

Another local company recently installed a new server at the same location and now when they first start up in the morning they are having problems with this work station. Not everyday but maybe 2 -3 times per week. It generates the following message. "ScanDisk cannot read from the last cluster on drive C. The cluster is either damaged, or your system is not configured properly. Drive C may need to have LBA enabled to work properly, or its disk partition may be incorrectly marked as a non-LBA partition. Data loss can occur if your LBA setting or disk partition type for this drive is misconfigured." If you simply hit "OK" the machine ignores the error and runs great for the rest of the day.

Since the bios only gives the option to run AUTO or USER I'm guessing that this issue is a result of forcing a smaller drive partition onto the larger drive with Norton Ghost. What drives me crazy is that this configuration worked great until the new server was installed. If you run scandisk it reports no errors on the drive.

Am I going to have to reformat and partition this machine to correct this error or do I have other options???

Thanks in advance for any input or suggestions

[Gabriel]

Hi,
Before you go on performing Format - let me suggest a little application from WD.
Data Lifeguard - it helped me in several cases before
you can get it on:
http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools

just one last thing - please (for your own well being) backup all your data before executing ANY disk utility.

Cheers,
Gabriel

[techs]

If you can get a copy of EZ Drive you can use it to test to slee if the bios is correctly identifying the drive. You also might want to do a thorough scan disk which will mark off the last cluster if it is indeed bad and not a result of a hard drive that is too large for the bios.

[cisco2]

Like Gabriel said, back your data up first. If it's critical data back it up twice.

Could be an impending hardware failure, have you run a surface scan?

I've seen very odd coincidences but having an added server cause a problem accessing a local partition seems a bit odd (conflicting drive letter assignments excepted).

Does this happen before they log in or during the login process?

Was there any client software loaded on the computer when the server was installed?

Tried booting the computer standalone?

If you have any partitioning apps like partition magic you might be able to resize the partition.

[Ruslan]

Use Drive Image 2002 (PowerQuest) instead of NG - it can automatically resize backup copy to destination drive's size (destination drive can be even having lesser size than original - only datasize matters) .

[confus-ed]

Not to disagree with Ruslan ... but I believe the latest version of Ghost(the NTFS enabled version), does this too .... Its all to do with 'alignment on cyclinder boundaries' ....

Block by block copying of data from one sized disk to another is fraught with minor technical difficulties, some times it works good, sometimes not so good, its all to do with 'fixed offset' data .... certain data on a disk is physically positioned as part of copyright protection ... if you move this to another disk with different geometry it can cause unexpected results, like here, something in a 'fixed' location is trying to find the end of the drive to confirm its authenticity, but its not where it ought because its on a different sized volume!

Ghost, Drive image, Data lifeguard & all the rest work basically the same .... to be 100% sure all your apps will work you have to do it the hard way....