-=PCTechTalk=- Re: Sandy's Stupid External :-)) And maybe a 2nd one too.
- From: "Sandy" <sandy.rick@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "PcTechTalk" <PcTechTalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:03:31 -0400
well back and feeling better but not great, but then again i never feel
great..ugh.
I'm not sure but I think gmail is having a hiccup.........all over my groups
and this one also there are a lot of emails I never see unless it's one
that's been replied to............I have a graphics groups that is extremely
high volume and wondered why suddenly there weren't many mails, but the
replies only go back to sender so most of the originals are not coming
through...........hope it's straightened up soon, makes reading replies all
the more inportant, lol.
my answers so far are below yours starting with XXX
> 2) tried to run scan and after a few hrs of no progress and still unable
> to close out with the X, just rebooted.
I get the feeling that it's actually trying to perform some repairs during
the time it appears to not move. Did you check the Event Viewer to see if
it recorded any activity?
XXX I never have even asked you what would be a reasonable amount of time to
let a scan run? Before using SuperFDisk I let it go at most about 20 hrs,so
I don't know if you want me to have already had it going for a while before
we connect?? I
just went back into the Event Viewer and looked but truthfully I don't know
what I'm looking for so it doesn't make sense to me........sorry.
> 3) while Rick was still home I opened up the case of the external and i
> couldn't tell you if something was loose or not as it was extremely
> compact and tight in there. I don't know how the cable was even able to
> fit........was definitely a tight fit. we just closed it back up, but
> Rick said if we need to he can try to take it out of it's house and put it
> in the other house, lol.
These external cases hold onto the drive itself using four screws on the
bottom of the enclosure and then the controller (the part that connects
directly to the drive) is attached to the side of the enclosure with four
more screws. To really get a good look at the connections, you'll need to
remove all eight screws and carefully slide the drive out of the unit being
very careful to not touch any exposed electronics on the underside of the
drive. There are only two connections made between the controller and the
drive itself. Those two are the power and data cables. If it's a SATA
drive, the data cable will be somewhat small and fragile looking. They
often have issues dtaying fully seated, so pull it and reseat it to make
sure it's secure. If it's an IDE drive, you'll see one of those wide, flat
ribbon cables instead. Those don't normally loosen over time, but carefully
pull and then reseat it just to be sure that it's not the cause of all this.
If you've never pulled one of these, note that they are usually a tight fit.
You will have to start on one side and work back and forth from one side to
the other until it becomes loose enough to remove from the port. Only try
to pull it out a little bit before switching over to the other side to
prevent too much stress on the cable. Finally, the power cable will have
four loose (but stiff) wires running to a molex connector where they connect
to the drive. Pull and reseat this as well.
XXX Well even tho Rick had chemo today, he still took the external
apart, but I can't imagine anything was loose cause it sure was tight
taking it apart, but we did it anyway, lol..........so that's done. Oh it's
an IDE by the way. All the hard drives in my old pc are/were.
> 4) i'm sure i got everthing off the old 20gig from my old pc, so I just
> left it in the enclosure and hooked that baby up to my computer and
> decided I'd just make it into an external..............ok.......I
> formatted, got the error about losing everything, clicked "yeah i know
> that" and let it go on and in maybe 2 minutes flat it was
> done...........hmmm.........showed up just fine in windows
> explorer..............so i decided I'd put my collection of fonts on it
> and they still show up ok, but I guess maybe there was a step i may have
> missed because it had been a C drive because when I reboot with it still
> on I get the errors "attempting boot from USB Device, NTLDR is missing,
> press ctrl & alt & delete to restart" Well ctrl/alt/delete does nothing,
> so I have to wait till it's ok to turn off the 20gig, then i have to hit
> the reset button on pc to turn off then back on.
This one is not really easy to explain, but I'll give it a shot. I have
explained it before, so maybe you'll recognize some of this. You're already
aware that a single drive can be partitioned into several 'virtual' drives.
Each partition then becomes a separate 'volume' in that they are assigned
different drive letters and appear for all intents & purposes as separate
hard drives within Windows. So far, so good.
There are two types of volumes that can be made when partitioning a drive
for use, Primary and Logical. Unless you use a program that gives you
control over the process, the first partition will be made as a Primary and
any additional partitions will be set as Logical. All of those additional
partitions will be contained within a single Extended partition, even if you
make ten of them. So, you end up with a single Primary and a single
Extended that can contain multiple Logical partitions. (and I do understand
if much of this seems confusing)
The Boot volume (the C: drive that serves as 'home' for the boot files and
main operating system) must reside on a Primary partition. The problem
you're encountering is that Windows is designed to treat Primary volumes as
though they are going to be home to an OS, even if that's not what you have
in mind for them. As a result, the first drive letters normally assigned to
hard drives will always go to Primary partitions first. Once all of those
are accounted for, Windows will go ahead and assigned additional letters to
all of the remaining Logical volumes in turn. So, if you have two hard
drives and both of them are partitioned with a single Primary and two
Logical volumes, you'l get the following result.
Hard Drive A installed by itself:
Primary partition 1a (C:)
Logical partition 2a (D:) & 3a (E:)
Hard drive B installed by itself:
Primary partition 1b (C:)
Logical partition 2b (D:) & 3b (E:)
Both drives combined on a single system:
Primary partition 1a (C:)
Primary partition 1b (D:)
Logical partition 2a (E:) & 3a (F:)
Logical partition 2b (G:) & 3b (H:)
Another way to say it is that the first drive's Primary will take the letter
C:, the second drive's Primary will take the letter D: and then Windows will
go back and assign letters to the Logical partitions on the first drive (E:
& F:) before moving back over to the second drive to assign its Logical
drives (G: & H:). Hopefully that all made sense of what is a convoluted
affair that we techs have to deal with all the time on multi-drive systems.
Still, the above scheme is only partly responsible for the problem you're
having. Windows' role in all of this is only to assign the letters. It's
actually your BIOS that tells Windows which of the drives should be
recognized first. In your case, when the external is on during bootup, the
BIOS gets the mistaken impression that the external should be the first
drive. It qualifies as a possible first drive for two reasons. The first
is that it's one and only partitioned space was created as a Primary volume,
so it could serve as a boot volume. The other factor lies in how the drives
are set within the BIOS' Setup area. Apparently, the external is bumping
the internal drive out of the top spot whenever the external is on and the
BIOS is awakened by you turning on the power. Without knowing the exact
BIOS that's running under your hood, I have no way to easily tell you what
changes you need to make to the BIOS settings to make that stop happening.
Since this is already a much longer answer than I had planned, ask me on a
separate thread about how to make the necessary change to the BIOS and we'll
discuss the steps to figuring it out.
XXX Wow that is a mouthful ;-). Actually Gman I was only doing that as an
experiment and have already unhooked this drive from the pc. I have no
desire to go into the BIOS and go through all that trouble for that drive,
when I'd rather save up and get a large one put into the pc in the extra
slot, and if I need more, besides this 120 gig external, I'll get a large
external after that, somewhere down the road. But now
I do understand the types of volumes a bit better, but I still wouldn't have
a clue as to how to partition a drive on my own.......yikes.
> Hopefully I didn't make a mess of trying to format my old C
> drive...yikes..............I just can't leave well enough alone.
You have done nothing to make things worse than they already were. On the
contrary, you actually brought to light an issue that needs to be dealt with
before your system will work the way you need it to work.
XXX Well I'm glad my experiment at least brought something to light :-)
Makes me wonder how long that list is getting of the things you're going to
check once connected to my pc again.
> And I guess I have some kind of autoplay on this pc, because when I turn
> on my 20gig, you can see all the fonts loading up on the desktop. I
> wonder if there is a way for that not to do that. Boy if I had the 120
> gig full of stuff and it had to load up everytime it's turned on
> it would be a pain. When I was hooking up the drives to transfer info to
> new pc I saw everything load up............it was extremely quick, but
> kinda freaked me out, lol. I don't know if there is something I really
> NEED this autoplay for. It doesn't have anything to do with music CDs
> automatically playing when put in right?
That type of Autoplay is a Microsoft invention (XP & Vista). It works great
on stuff like memory cards since they usually only contain a bunch of the
same types of files (pictures on a camera card, etc.), but it's terrible on
external drives that have lots of different things on it. To make it stop,
let it go through the entire process the next time it comes up. When it's
done, you'll be presented with a menu asking how you'd like to handle that
type of file in the future. Click the box at the bottom that tells it to
always use this approach and then select "Do Nothing" from the list. Click
OK and your preference will be written into the registry.
If you aren't presented with the menu, it means that at some point you had
already told it to "Always use this approach", but with one of the other
selections form that menu. In this case, follow the directions below.
To change how your computer handles multimedia content
1.. Open My Computer.
2.. Right click the device you want, such as a digital camera or CD-ROM
drive, and then click Properties.
3.. On the AutoPlay tab, click the multimedia content type you want to
change.
4.. Under Actions, click the action you want Windows to perform when it
detects the media type you selected.
You'll probably want to select each possible content type in turn and set
them all to "Do Nothing". Afterwards, the drive should just appear as a
drive without any fancy autoplay involved, no matter what you might toss
onto the drive.
XXX Thanks so much for this info.
> Another thing I had noticed on the 120 gig external and forgot to mention
> before was when I click on the icon to see if it's ok to turn it off, a
> window comes up with the following info:
>
> Safely Remove Hardware Window:
>
> USB Mass Storage Device
> WDCWD12 00JB-OOFUAOUSB Device
> Generic Volume - G
>
> Then you click "stop" and:
>
> The "stop a hardware device" window shows as: This is what I see:
>
> USB Mass Storage Device
> WDCWD12 00JB-OOFUAO USB Device
> Generic Volume (G:)
>
>
> It's like there's 3 things to choose from to click on and I don't know
> which to click on, but have been clicking on the WDC(bla bla bla)one.
> Hope that's right.
When you select the correct one and instruct it to unmount, you should see
the drive's volume letter disappear from within Windows Explorer &/or
MyComputer. On my own system, all of my drives are SATA (which are
'hot-swappable'), so they all apprear in that area. I have to select the
correct drive letter in order to unmount my own externals.
XXX Wow, I ask a lot of questions ;-) I tried choosing both the WDC (yada
yada yada) and
in a separate instance the Generic Volume G and they both showed the G Drive
as gone in
Windows Explorer.
Sandy
---------------------------------------------------------------
Please remember to trim your replies (including this sentence and everything
below it) and adjust the subject line as necessary.
To unsubscribe or change your email settings:
//www.freelists.org/webpage/pctechtalk
To access our Archives:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PCTechTalk/messages/
//www.freelists.org/archives/pctechtalk/
To contact only the PCTT Mod Squad, write to:
pctechtalk-moderators@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
To join the PCTableTalk off-topic group, send a blank email to:
pctabletalk+subscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
---------------------------------------------------------------
Other related posts:
