Awhile ago i tried to setup an external hdd for my nieces wii. i needed to change the paritition.
I installed (an old version) of norton's paritition magic, when it started up it said there were some minor issues on the other external hdd's i am using and it could fix it which i let it do.
Then when it was done it said all my hdds were bad minus 1.
Thinking that the program was crap and probably too old i wanted to exit it but a blue screen of death beat me to it , forcing it to reboot.
Then the pc kept going in a loop of rebooting and not getting past the loading screen.
At that point i thought i lost everything on my drives (2 tb) but i still had an ace up my sleeve, hirens boot rescue cd.
I tried one paritition fix program on it , but that didnt help. i was starting to sweat.
Then i tried another paritition program (Cant remember the name) and at startup it said some things were bad and i agreed to let it fix it and this time got my c back and i could access everything again.

Now you might think whats the problem still then?
Well the days after i tried to clean up my drives by burning stuff and copied and moved alot of files without problems but today i tried coping a few dvd covers and it said it couldnt do it because the drive was bad. also a few covers had become bad.
Also my pc sometimes seems a bit slower then usual
But i have used wdd's diagnostic tool and the quick test shows the drives have no errors.
So thats what leads me to believe the parititions are still not proper and i wonder if and how i could fix that without screwing up my drives again or even more.

If everything is backed up that you want backed up then I'd start over from scratch. Reinstall Windows. Partition and format as a part of that process before the actual installation begins.

See if that gets things back up to speed.

I've rebooted my laptop a couple dozen times because it just bogs down after so long. A partition shouldn't need a dedicated program to fix it though. The partition is just a directory name for your hard drive to use. Usually if it's bugging out, you need to go into the manual DOS settings at boot-up, and use that to take you to the partition directory. Then you delete the old one and make a new one to replace it. It should wind up with the same name. This may require your OS to be re-installed however.

I think you may have had one too many stabs in the dark here frankly. it would take a brave man to recommend anything other than scandisk as a last ditched effort to fix the file system. Your advise is for him to delete his partition?

This absolutely WILL not only require a reinstall but will destroy any remaining data too.(ok it won't technically but that's another topic way beyond the scope of this discussion).

Just don't do it if you value that data or you run out of options completely.

If the partition is as bad as he's stating and with ineffectiveness of both programs and scans, then that's the easiest and fastest method. Everyone's going to tell him to back up his data, and it's something said so often that it's not worth making someone waste their time reading it for the 8000th time. I think Legum would already know to do so anyway.

i am considering to reset a backup (which i do make frequently) still it currently has a lot of stuff on it which i would first need to relocate or burn.
that might fix my c:\ drive and perhaps and hopefully make windows to a somewhat normal speed again.

but i would still be left with the cannot copy issue because of a supposedly bad disk (which ís my 2tb f:\ disk and a different disk then my C:\) on the other hand that could just have been a windows flunk.
also if something is bad in my paritition on that f: anything i do from that might still create slowdowns doing sutff from and on that disk if something is bad.

in short my c:\, windows that i can fix. the 2tb f:\ drive which is completely full well thats some sort of a problem

Not sure what version of Partition Magic you are using but version 8's maximum supported HD size is 300 GB IIRC. I would not use PM 8 or lower to partition or fix any HD's larger than the 300GB max. It's been a while since I used PM so you might want to research this for your own satisfaction.

If I have remembered correctly this limit would cause problems with partitioning / repairing any 2 TB drive.

That..... might work. Back-ups usually restore all the programs, data and settings to what it was at the time, so anything new you wanted to keep would have to be stored on an external or flash storage. Problem is I don't know if it also reverses errors in the top level programs. You'd also have to have an idea of knowing how long it's been bad so that you can back-up to the right place without losing too much.

I don't believe you have a bad disk but rather a fucked up file-system which as I said earlier you probably aren't going to fix without making things worse.

Many backup programs will ignore copy errors and continue, you would lose anything it ignored but at least you would get the rest.

That's your best hope as I see it.

i have a full clean backup with every program and thing i always use. (which takes about a day and is alot better then reinstalling from scratch) made 2 months ago because i updated some stuff like a new virusscanner.
only need to move away some savegames (which i always miss a few lol)
guess i could and should do that tommorow, hope it will fix the issues on thte f:\ too though.

well i mentioned in another post that it tried to fix the start sectors (i believe) atleast some sectors. if it just changed the beginning of the drive then maybe just a few files have become bad. it happened 10 days ago and i burned alot, tested rarred files sometimes to check. all good.
if it was a fucked up file system i think i would have encountered way more issues.
there must be a way to atleast scan for issues like that i think.

I took his statement about not screwing up the drives to mean he didn't want to lose any data, maybe he didn't mean that...

i dont want to lose my data. and i do always backup my c:\. but i have 11tb of data i cant back that all up. i want to do in the future but without a job and the high hdd prices at the moment its impossible.

matter of fact i already lost 2tb once on an external i dropped. but that was stuff i could get again.

Ver 8 would induce some errors in a large hd. My only suggestion would be doing an error check. Go to Window explorer, right click the hd, click properties, click the tools tab and click the "Check Now" button.. Check both boxes and Start. When it tells you it cannot do an error check with files in use would you like to schedule an error check at next startup click yes.

Reboot and allow the error check to run to the end . . . could take 2 or 3 hrs . . . don't stop it or turn you computer off. If you don't have time to let it finish I suggest NOT doing this check until you do have time.

It will show a very low ( 11 or 12 %) until around step 5 so don't get impatient. It will finish sooner if you don't check the second box but I believe it is worth the extra time.

Since PM 8 does not understand a 2 TB drive it made some changes that Window may see as errors and correct . . . or not. Anyway, this would be my first step before doing anything radical . . . =)

yep, hence why i couldnt even load windows nor access my c drive. which i could fix with some other program just dont know how good it fixed it.
will let it scan the 2tb f: drive, tommorow c: