6.5 hour repartition. What?

July 11, 2009 2:30 PM

What the heck is going on with this laptop as I reformat and set it up to dual boot?

Man I hate to waste a question like this.

My girlfriend just bought a new Toshiba laptop. It's got a 360gb HDD and windows vista. We checked drivers and decided to get rid of vista and put XP and 7 on it instead.

I tried to follow lifehacker's guide, but it would NOT allow me to repartition the existing drive. (actually there were three. a 1.5Gb, a 7Gb, and the rest all on one. I know the 7 is the system restore, but we don't need it, so I removed it and added it to the main.)

Anyway, it still wouldn't let me resize and my copy of partitionmagic only works up to XP, so that was a no-go.

I've now downloaded gparted and split the big partition into 2, and told it to format the second partition NTFS.

Here's the kicker. Creating the partition took 2.5 hours. Now it's...hell, I don't know what it's doing, it's still saying 0 of 2 steps completed and "moving sba to left and resizing to xxx". It also says 4 hours remaining.

What the hell?

It also tells me that if I stop it, I will likely have severe filesystem errors. I don't really care, because I'm wiping the system anyway. What I don't want to happen is have the disk be unreadable.

I've partitioned a million drives before. I've never heard of it taking 6 hours.

So, to wit...I don't care about any files on this thing right now. XP and 7 will be the dual-boot choices.

What to do, what to do?

posted by TomMelee to computers & internet (13 comments total)

You don't want to RESIZE the partitions, which is what it sounds like it's doing - this involves keeping all existing data intact, just shuffling it around. You want to delete the existing partitions completely and create new ones. I suggest using the XP/Win7 installer for this, it'll probably be easier.

This is assuming that you don't care about the data that's already on the machine.
posted by wsp at 3:05 PM on July 11

Resizing an NTFS partition takes a very long time.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 3:11 PM on July 11

Yea, I'm a giant goofus, got wrapped up and didn't think about what I was doing. Thanks for the clarity.

I stopped the resize and used another partition tool to delete, create, and format the partitions. Interestingly, XP crashes when I try to install. Never had that happen before.

7 is installing right now. Now I have to figure out what's up with XP, and then worry about getting a boot manager to work since I will have installed them in the (mostly) wrong order. That shouldn't be too hard, I don't think.

The actual partition creation only took about 20 seconds, fwiw.
posted by TomMelee at 3:32 PM on July 11 [1 favorite]

XP doesn't have sata controller drivers built in, so will fail when trying to install as it can't find the hard-drive. You'll need the appropriate ones for your laptop on a floppy disk, and likely a USB floppy disk-drive to put it in (and hit f6 at the prompted moment). Option B - modify your XP install cd to include the sata drivers. Option C is you can put the drive-controller in the BIOS into IDE-emulation mode, but you'll lose AHCI support (NCQ and the faster 150Mb/s or 300Mb/s SATA speed) and switching modes will break any copies of windows you installed before making the switch.

Once you get it on, you'll need to do some messing with the boot manager to get it working. You can either repair the windows 7 boot sequence after installing XP, and then add windows xp to the 7 boot manager. Alternatively, use a 3rd party boot manager like boot-us.

Given the fun with such drive controllers, I'd be tempted to start again; get XP on first, using the AHCI driver install or the ide-emulation, then install windows 7 clean alongside, and it'll sort out the dualboot setup for you.
posted by ArkhanJG at 2:07 AM on July 12

Hey Arkhan, thanks for that. Another big fat DUH for me. I can find SATA drivers for xp on the toshiba website, but they only try to install...not extract, thus not actually giving them to me.

She seems happy with 7, I guess that'll work for now.
posted by TomMelee at 5:12 AM on July 12

The SATA drivers you want will be specifically labelled "F6 Floppy" drivers or similar. The standard XP SATA drivers are, as you've found out, no use to you. Also, attempting to use a USB floppy might not work, depending on how your BIOS presents it to the XP installer. Here's a workaround for that issue.

If I were in your position, I'd be using nLite to make a customized Windows XP installer CD with the required F6 driver slipstreamed in.
posted by flabdablet at 3:54 PM on July 13

Yea, I was all ready to make the slipstreamed CD. However, I cannot find the drivers as a series of files...rather as an installer from Intel that won't extract because the extracting computer doesn't have that chipset.

Fail.
posted by TomMelee at 6:41 AM on July 14

If you post a link to that installer, I'll attempt to unpack it for you into a format that nLite can use.
posted by flabdablet at 7:14 AM on July 14

OK, got your links. As I kind of suspected, you're attempting to use the standard Windows drivers, not the F6 (installer) drivers - mainly because Toshiba helpfully fails to provide a download link for those. You will probably get a better result if you start here.
posted by flabdablet at 5:03 AM on July 15

By the way, when you get up to choosing which F6 driver to slipstream, you will probably need to know that your A305 has the Mobile Intel GM45 Express chipset and that this includes an ICH9M I/O controller. I doubt you'll be using RAID on a laptop, so just specify the ICH9M AHCI controller option.
posted by flabdablet at 5:08 AM on July 15

You sir, are win.

Can I send you an HDMI cable for your efforts?

/obscure
posted by TomMelee at 12:04 PM on July 15

I have no use for an HDMI cable, but by all means send one to somebody who does.
posted by flabdablet at 5:57 PM on July 16

Nah, it was a joke. Remember the dude who kept offering to send people free HDMI cables when someone helped him out? No? Oh. I thought it was almost a meme. Lose.
posted by TomMelee at 7:53 PM on July 16