Hasta la Vista: Disk Manager Terminates Partitions

Put: 7.11.2006 | Rev 7.11.2006 | Contributed by Andrew Mallett

My home system had a nice surprise for me the other day, when it trashed two of my data partitions WITHOUT EVEN ASKING NICELY. And this problem's not just limited to Windows Vista either!

My setup is slightly unusual in that I couldn't get Vista 64 RC1 to dual boot in a gentlemanly manner with my existing XP install, even though it does so nicely on my no. 2 system. So to get both operating systems to work, I used an olde dodge whereby I have two primary partitions, one XP one Vista, both of whom are totally unaware of each other. Then to boot one or the other I simply change the 'active' flag on the relevant partition.

One used to use this technique to dual boot Windows 98 and Windows NT, back in the frontier days of yore when FAT32 an NTFS couldn't see each other, you used to carry a copy of BOOTPART.EXE in your underpants just in case, and men were men and sheep ran away..

Active partition switching is best done with a clear mind and a strong stomach, through a third party utility like Partition Expert or Partition Magic or some little multi-boot facility. However this requires a reboot to said widget. One Dark & Stormy evening when I as feeling as sharp as a marble, I noted that it is possible to right click on the 'other' primary partition in Disk Manager (both XP and Vista) and turn this into the active partition. Thus on reboot, the system boots to the other partition. Sounds good.

Ah, all very well in theory. Here is a screenshot of XP's Disk Manager before swapping the active primary partition. The whole of Disk 1 is a hardware RAID 0, using 2 x 120GB SATA disks which are seen by the operating system as one humongous single hard disk volume. Note the XP PP which is C:, a hidden PP which is Vista, and three logical drives, D:, E: and F: in the Extended Partition..

Right clicking on the hidden Primary Partition gives the option of making it the active partition..

A warning about non-booting, but no mention of data burning in hell..

Clicking YES spells the killing fields for drives E: and F: which have now mysteriously gone South, together with your collection of er, rare bird photographs. The gaping yaw of 148GB worth of EMPTY EXTENDED PARTITION SPACE now occupies the space where your downloaded porn valuable data used to be..

There is no facility to reverse this decision. Any attempt to recreate the lost partitions results in an error under XP or Vista RC1. I had to boot to Partition Expert, recreate the lost drives and copy the data back from backup (Disk 0/Drive U:) which was mercifully untouched by XP's partition mangling debauch.

Note to all new players: hardware RAID 0 works rather nicely for performance in my experience. However you MUST have some kind of backup, like a third hard disk. If the RAID 0 bites the dust, your partitions and data will be pushing up the daisies with it. I use a third IDE 320GB hard disk and use Second Copy 2000 to copy any new data over from the RAID automatically on system shutdown. This is sometimes referred to as RAID 0 + 1.

Footnote: I also backup regularly to one of my faithful Unix file servers via a Samba share. Y'know, just in case..

- A.