wierd HDD problems

[garwain]

Over the weekend I went to a clients who wanted to salvage 2 older drives out of a system he didn't use in order to do backups, nad extend his available HDD space. One was an old seagate 2g and the other was a quantum bigfoot 4.24Gig drive. I got both drives in, and the system booted fine, shut down, screwed drives into place, closed the case tucked it back into it's corner pluged in the rest of the junk... card writer, ext zip, printer, etc. upon boot, I got a norton AV screen saying it could not find configuration files. after playing with it for a while I found that by removing the seagate, which was pri-slave, the system would boot normally. After a while, I checked the partitions. Low and behold, fdisk showed drive1 primary partition to be active, and drive 2 primary partition active. drive 3 was fine. fired up pq magic killed, and re-created the fat partition on the seagate and still nothing.
I had to leave at that point, and the client didn't mind me disabling the drive in the bios untill I have more ideas on how to fix it, so I'm asking if anyone here has had similar problems, and it normal to have more than one partition on seperate drives to be marked as status A?

 

[franklin97355]

Only one partition should be active. Are you trying to save the data on the seagate? If not use fdisk to remove the partitions and then recreate a new partition with the drives installed as you want them when you are done. Fdisk should not allow you to set two partitions active.

 

[garwain]

Not worried about the info on the seagate. I already dropped the partition once and recreated it with Partition Magic 5. Maybe PQMagic messed up. I'll try with FDISK the next time I go there.

 

[Scanner929]

Norton labeled products and Symantec product line in general is bad to the core IMHO. They almost always cause more problems than they fix. Not to mention that most computer problems are user inflicted. It's been more that a few times that I have been asked the question "how come norton didn't fix it" That's my Norton rant. Anyhow your HDD problem sounds like you need to make sure your pri master is the only HDD with an active partition. if all seems right with the hardware after that, turf norton.