Disk Management Questions

[Bob12603]

Two quick questions about Disk Management (screen shot attached) ...

1) What's that little "Healthy" 2MB area at the end of the C drive?

2) Disk 2 is not "Unallocated"! It's my E drive and appears perfectly healthy. Is this anything I should be concerned about?

Thanks (I just discovered this forum and the Seven Forums and I am very impressed.)

Bob

 

[Brink]

Hello Bob, and welcome to Vista Forums.

The 2MB partition on Disk 0 shows as your "Active" partition that contains your MBR (Master Boot Record). If you really wanted that space back you could mark the C partition "Active" and use Startup Repair or EasyBCD to repair the MBR to be on C instead, but I'd recommend leaving the 2MB partition alone and not deleting it. Instead, I would just wait until the next time you decide to reinstall Windows, then delete all partitions on Disk 0 until it's all unallocated space to use to reinstall Vista on.

For Disk 2, it looks like you need to right click on the actual small Disk 2 box just to the left of the "Unallocated" box in the lower part of the middle pane in Disk Management, then see if you have an "Initialize Disk" option to click on and bring Disk 2 back "online".

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Bob12603]

Thanks Brink. I don't need the 2MB in the area containing the MBR. I was just very curious about what it was.

I failed to mention that Disk 2, my E drive, has a lot of data on it (which I have no problem accessing). The Help indicates that "Initialize Disk" assumes that the disk is new. I can't find a consistent answer via Google searches as to whether Initialize Disk destroys data. But I do have room to copy all of the stuff on the E drive to another drive so I think I'll do that before I try Initialize Disk.

Thanks again for your help.

Bob

 

[Brink]

Hell Bob, sorry for the late reply. No, "Initialize Disk" doesn't format the disk, but only brings it back online.