Strange E1405 (640m) partitioning behavior

I helped a friend of mine to partition and reinstall Windows XP Media center edition on his new Inspiron 640m (E1405). As I remember the 80GB HDD was partitioned in to 4: 30+MB, 57GB, 17GB and a 3GB. 57GB had Windows bloatware™ installed . I started by deleting all the partitions after 57GB. Afterwards installed XP MCE, then Media Direct; it automatically got installed on to a 1.7GB partition at the end of the disk. Up to this point everything went fine (MD also worked fine, tested with a movie DVD).

Then I partitioned the remaining section (between MediaDirect and 57GB) as a primary NTFS partition (D: ). Copied some stuff and rebooted. Puff ! D Drive was gone! . In the disk management it showed up as NTFS healthy (Unknown partition). I couldn’t do anything to it except delete; so I deleted, reformatted, copied some files and rebooted. Again it disappeared, this kept on happening…. Thought maybe MD is acting up so I removed it and created one Primary NTFS partition. Rebooted : same problem! . Then I created an extended partition and a logical drive, this time D: drive survived the reboot. Afterwards I removed the extended partition and installed MD, then partitioned the rest as an Extended>Logical. Everything worked after that on the Windows side except MD. Pressing the MD button loads up MD splash screen but it wont go beyond that.

It was getting late, so my fried asked me to just forget about MD and make his notebook work with all of the HDD space. so I removed MD partition, made an extended > Logical dive of the remaining space and left it at that. He didn’t know about MD before I showed it to him, so he is not worried about missing it at all… but I am just curious as to know what happened. I have reinstalled Windows many times but this is the first time something like this happened. AFAIK XP can support 4 primary partitions. Any of you guys have an idea as to what happened?

 

I've seen a similar problem, on my (retired) M140. I solved that problem by making every partition a primary partition.

Do all the partitioning (NO logical partitions), then install MD and see if that works.

I don't know the exact cause, but I'm fairly certain MD doesn't play nice with logical partitioning.

 

Actually my problem was trying to create primary partitions, manage to solve it by creating an extended partition. Well… the notebook is not with me anymore. Since my friend doesn’t care about MD I might not play with it again… But still I am baffled by what happened.

 

Something similar happened to me. However it was that it seemed that the partition table was different between MD startup and normal startup. It took me a good 6 hours but after that both buttons behaved exactly the same except the MD button would startup windows xp and automagically invoke Media Center during startup and after logon.

 

Hi guys,

I know its an old thread - but it has a thing or two in common with my problem. I have a HD that I partitioned with Windows XP - first a primary partition for the install, and left the rest of the space unallocated. Thereafter I made 3 other primary partitions on the HD using the build in Disk Manager. Everything went fine until a problem with my install made me recover with an Acronis image program. Now my 3 partitions dont show up in XP "My computer", but only in the disk manager tool. Here they are all marked as healthy but unknown - is there a way to reconnect them, should I try a recovery tool or should I try to fix the partition table? There is data I really would like to get hold of on one of the partitions, btw - its 40 GB NTFS(xp), 40 GB NTFS(alt os), 32 GB FAT32 (sharedData), 40 GB NTFS (musicAndMoview).

Cheers,