HDD woes

[Masamune]

I decided to dl the mandrake linux 10 the other day, I love it btw. =D I have 2 twenty gig hard drives and XP uses both. I go to resize my 2nd drive to give linux about 5 or 6 gigs to play with, and my partitioning software crashes... I get frusterated and go back to windows for some UT 2004, to realize it's a dead shortcut. I go to check it out and my 2nd drive isn't being picked up by windows. I reboot and use my partitioning software to look at the drive and it says it's unformatted when it clearly has an NTFS label. I delete the partition, and reformat it to NTFS. I get hammered with defective clusters of data and takes forever to sort through them. After that's done, it still says unformatted and windows doesn't detect it. I try it again, and it goes through the SAME clusters. I try a linux format and it works fine. No problems at all. And I still have all of my space for some reason after all of those defective clusters. Could my drive just be rejecting NTFS all of the sudden? Or anyone know wtf is going on?

[Gerudo]

are any of your drives fat32? afaik, you can only see an ntfs label under winxp if you are...

[Deviance]

What software did you use? Partition Magic really sucks when doing that kind of stuff. I use Acronis Disk Director Suite. It's worth a download.

[Masamune]

No, the one with the OS is NTFS, and I'm using system commander.

[{DSG}DarkRaven]

Uh.... why use a third party program when DOS does partitioning just fine? Or were you trying to be fancy and repartition the thing without losing data? At any rate, you've messed the darn thing up, and the best way to fix it IMO is to make a boot disk (easily accomplished if you have a copy of '98 lying around), startup in DOS, and start over again. Gerudo is probably right, you've likely got a partition format that windows won't recognize.