Unallocated 7.84 mb space materializes (from Outer Space?)

alphanumeric said:

... Your unallocated chunk is just at the front of the drive instead of the end of the drive. Likely because you installed windows 7 then windows XP instead of the other way around.

XP is known to create the dynamic disk thingness -after- the XP partition. You have reason to believe that my XP somehow created it in the first 16065 sectors where part of the Win7 partition had resided? How? Why?

alphanumeric said:

Either way its "Unallocated" space, meaning there is nothing in there. Its unpartitioned, unformatted space on the hard drive.

This is true.

alphanumeric said:

IMHO your making a mountain out of a mole hill.

Give me a plausible explanation re creation/existence of the 16065 sectors given the previous disk config and I will immediately declare it a non-issue.

While you're at it, consider the following Partition Wizard operations:

When I delete the Win7 partition from disk2 and copy <same> from disk1 to the same location on disk2, the 7.84 mb is no longer reported.

When I resize the Win7 partition, adding the 7.84 mb, it sez the op was successfully completed. But no change was made. What is reported is exactly the same as before the resize op.

As I said before, all I seek is control. If I'm aware of all that's stored on my disks and where it came from, I have control. If unexplainable components are present, I lack control.

'Tis only re things digital that I am a Control-Freak. I don't require total control in my personal life, such as it is.

P

Look, I don't have that 7 MB space on any of my drives. I guess this means that this is not a Windows 7 problem. Now, how do you get rid of it? Well, wipe your drive, delete all partitions, wipe it again, reformat, repartition with Windows 7 installer, install Windows 7. After this, and it's no guarantee, but most likely you won't see your 7 MB space.

As to how you got this in the first place, I don't know. Perhaps it's a partition wizard problem, although I doubt it, since I have used that tool as well and have not seen this problem. Maybe it's a legacy of your XP installations, I never upgraded XP, I always install OSs on clean empty drives.

Maybe someone else would know more of this issue.

TVeblen said:

OK, I'll take you at your word and offer up this WAG (Wild-Ass Guess).

Since we know those sectors make up the first track on a spinning hard disk, perhaps there are one or more bad sectors on that track and the system defaults to the first "clean " track, or something along those lines. Which might also explain why it happens on your hard drive and not on others.

Congratulations. That is the first plausible-sounding explanation I've received, given the particulars.

I was somehow under the impression that, if bad sectors were found, say, previous to any partitioning, the system would do a remap or similar and the controller would no longer reference those sectors (and they wouldn't appear in a Part. Wiz. report). But I'm no storage engineer.

Here is some Part. Wizard info on the device in question:
Disk 1, Total Sectors: 976,773,168, Name: SAMSUNG HD502HJ, GUID Partition Table: NO, Dynamic Disk: NO, CHS:60801/255/63

The 16065 sectors divided by 63 sectors/track = 255, the # of heads / cylinder, using the old symbolic referencing. Question becomes "Was the first cyl. on the disk device bad?".

The best indicators I have are the SMART diagnostics displayed by Speedfan. In general, they indicate no problem. All functions are 'Very Good' or 'Normal'. Overall 'fitness' and 'performance' is 97%. Functions like Raw Read Error Rate, Reallocated Sector Count, and Seek Error Rate show raw values of 0.

As nearly as I can tell, The Mystery Persists.

Thanks,
P

Well have you considered that the exact number which shows up in a lot of peoples XP install is due to simply disk alignment.