BleepingComputer.com: Cannot open drive

That is way beyond my capablities and I do not like the idea of going in to the BIOS. I have never been able to burn a ISO to disc even though I have followed instructions on different sites. I will have to try and find someone to do this for me.

I am sorry I got over your head there,

When you had that terminal infection over a year ago, it looks like someone reinstalled windows on a different drive, in your screenshot F is the 184Gig partition on the 186Gig drive

That partition was your C drive when Harry tried to remove that nasty infection.

I remember that the person I paid seemed to have some problems and when he finally got Windows reinstalled he told me that he had had to change the drive letters round. Even my 2 DVD recorders letters had to be changed. Should he have disconnected the two drives and just left C connected?

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That's what I would have done, but I would have deleted both partitions, little tricky but doable.

After reinstalling windows I would have run flash_disinfector and then connected the other drives then run it again and then scanned every file on those drives a few times with installed AV and 2 or 3 online scanners.

All those torrent downloads can be very dangerous

He probably changed the boot drive to preserve your data in the old partition so you could recover it if you needed. Just taking the easy route instead of having to copy your data before deleting the partition and hoping he saved everything.

I wouldn't have wiped out the restore partition myself. I would have copied it to the end of your new drive and booted to it using a GRUB loader, then restored the freespace with your recovery partition, making you a new windows installation from the old recovery data on your new drive... but that's just me. xD

Gabrial and Chewy,

You have both gone way over my head. What is a partition? Does it mean dividing the space on a drive. If so, to what purpose?

geotan, on Sep 29 2010, 06:34 AM, said:

Yes a partition is just that dividing a drive into smaller pieces. Some people do this to make space for a backup, some do this to just have one small partition for the Operating System and the rest of the drive for everything else.

But why would this drive be partitioned? The operating system in on my C Drive. The drive I had problems with was my F Drive which I use for work in progress and I have a third drive G for finished work.

geotan, on Sep 29 2010, 07:19 AM, said:

I haven't got any idea on why it's partitioned the way you have it. Did you setup this machine or did someone else do it?

Just a minor correction...a partition is the basic structure used to make the hard drive useable by Windows.

It doesn't necessarily involve dividing the hard drive into segments...many partitions are the same size as the drive.

Formatting and creating a partition...are the foundation of using a hard drive for anything useful. Without these two aspects...you just have something which is of no value in terms of using a computer.

Louis

Unfortunately I cannot get hold of the man who reinstalled windows for me, to ask him why the partition. I am beginning to think that he was not as good as he claimed.

I wouldn't worry about it. Every drive needs at least one partition. From looking at your system I would guess it went like this when he repaired it.

The system boot drive came default from the manufacturer with two partitions, one for your OS and one for your Recovery partition.

He knew you were having problems and had data you wanted to keep, so he took an empty or nearly empty second drive and put it in place of your old system drive, and created a new windows installation on it. This is actually not bad, as it would make sure you didn't have any malware loading into your OS from the old installation.

Then he gave you your computer and said it was good to go, which it was. He just didn't reset the permissions on the old drive so you could read all the data on the new OS. A minor mistake, and one that I myself might make, as the focus of the procedure was getting you a new OS going on a known good drive. The recovery of old data was likely secondary in his mind at the time.



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Thank you for all your help. As always it is invaluable. Hopefully, I won't need to pester you for a long time.
George.

Glad to get you going. Happy computing!

Oh to have your knowledge.
George.