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Forum : Windows XP Support
Partition Table Layout
From: nedjinski Date: Sun, 3 May 2009 17:46:03 -0700 Can someone help me read the partition table as displayed in the MS Disk Management window? I have one drive with 5 partitions on it. recently because of a MBR and/or boot sector virus I had to reinstall XP to the C: drive partition and after doing so my Disk Management display looks like the following: there are 5 compartments for the 5 partitions - the first and the last have dull gray borders with a dark blue bar on top - partitions 2,3,4 have a light green border with a bright blue bar on top. what do the colors / borders mean? all partitions say "healthy". if I look at this disk in Partition Magic I see only one single partition (yellow border) - not 5 - which says "bad". the computer runs normally as far as I can tell - will I have problems in the future if there is something wrong here? or can I get away with it being this way? when I reinstalled XP I intentionally didn't reformat the drive because of data on the other partitions that I didn't want to lose. can I repair the basic partition structure if necessary without having to reformat the drive? nedjinski wrote: These are primary partitions. These are logical drives inside an extended partition. Look at the very bottom of the Disk Management pane and the colors in use are explained. No way that we can tell. If chkdsk runs ok and if the disk manager says the disks are healthy and if all your data is intact then things would appear to be fine, but we can't say for sure, we don't know any more than you do, we don't know what was or wasn't done to the partitions. With a virus in the picture you may never be 100% sure of the integrity of the disks, if it were me I would zero out the *whole* disk with a write protected utility known to be virus free, the boot disk for the utility should be created on a clean computer and it should be write protected so that the virus doesn't infect the disk when you boot the computer with it. To repair the partition structure you would probably have to remove all the partitions and recreate them, we don't really know if this is necessary or not. In any case, if you value your data you certainly will have a backup on an independent media, that way if the disk fails or if the partitions explode you will be prepared... John W/O the reformat,youre bound to have problems...Either way,go to run, type:cmd In cmd type:DiskPart In DiskPart,type:list disk Then type: list volume You'll see the info,type:HELP For all DiskPart cmds "nedjinski" wrote: |
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