Copying - true moving of files, or just addresses?

[Loose rivets]

Firstly, I lost a lot of photos while manipulating partitions. There's no problems about the data. Just some photos copied to the 'new' machine that I've had all the problems with. I'll simply transfer them again. But, I'd love to know how they got lost?

Last paragraph is the real question, the rest just how it came about.


Determined to clean-install W7, and even more determined to have 100gig C drive plus two others, I fitted a second hard disc and attacked the main drive with the XP that I was now running on. Cleaned out C by deleting the partition and making a new one c 100gigs. Fine. But...

When W7 installed, I'd hoped to expand D into the space. Totally barred from creating a new primary drive cos the 100mb system file was counted it seems - and this barred me cos of the total count exceeding 4. (had to leave F for a while) LSS I shoved data about so that I finally got the drives I wanted. C D and E. However, it soon became apparent that a great deal of data was simply missing.

Often, when we move files from folder to folder, the data is not really moved- just the addresses reset. . . or so I gather. But when the data is going from one partition to another, I'd assumed that it was really rewritten, indeed the HD light was flickering fit to bust. If the data wasn't truly rewritten, then when I removed the partition to meld it into the other unoccupied space, the data would have been lost I assume.

Does the team think this is what happened? :

[alisoncc]

Sorry. Changing partitions wipes everything. It really does make any previous content inaccessible. Once upon a time when HDD were much smaller, the partition hadn't been reformatted and you had the time you may have been able to read the disk block-by-block in Hex looking for a file, but since we went to gigabyte drives little chance. That's unless the file is of extreme value and needs to be recovered at any cost.

[Loose rivets]

It was like an IQ test, or FreeCell. Shoving stuff about as space became ready.

Rules. No messing with C and no use of a third party's product like Partition Magic.

Just in case anyone finds it interesting, I'll go over it more to clarify the technique in my own mind.

I can't quite remember the sequence, but at one stage I seemed to be bulked at every turn. But some considerable number of folders and data did survive.

The question is, does the data actually get rewritten . . . or just update whatever NTFS has as a file system?

On disk manager, the drives are displayed from left to right. I'll refer to the left as First, progressing to the right.

1/ System 100Mb

2/ OS 100Gb

3/ Unallocated >100Gb

4/ Primary partition >100Gb

5/ Logical drive Green boarder >100Gb

C was to stay clean, having done a full format and system load. So, no dumping data there.

ie At this stage I had new Windows 7 on C, the remainder of C that I had relinquished - as I reduced the size of C - came next. It was marked as unallocated.

Okay, thinks I, I'll have four logical drives...that'll do.

The problem was that the 100mb System section at the 'front' or First, seemed to count as a partition, so when I tried to make a drive in the Unallocated part, I was bulked by a warning that I was trying to create too many partitions.

I know the limit is 4, but there seemed to be no way to just make 'logical' drives as opposed to Primary Partitions. As mentioned, it had given me one already, but that just happened. So many options were greyed out.

So, I copied a few gig of data from 4 to the last drive: 5.

Finally, after some angst, I dispensed with 4 so that it would join the unallocated void.

Then I'm not sure. I think I made a drive in the 'void' of a size I wanted. This way, 5 could be allowed to be extended Downwards. Anyway, when I'd created this, I put all the date in it. By some means I used the remaining Unallocated to make the last drive bigger.

Then I put some of the data back into what had become E, leaving a bit in D. It was about now that I noticed a few gig missing.

As a by the way: Each time I created a drive, I did a quick format.

[Keef]

You can resize existing partitions, subject to certain conditions. On the whole, I've found it more faff than it's worth and I usually plug in a new hard drive, partition that the way I want it, install the operating system and program files, and then copy my "stuff" onto it. Hard drives are cheap; my "stuff" is valuable (to me).

Otherwise, my understanding is that moving stuff in the same partition just involved changing "flags", whereas moving between partitions involves reading it, writing it to the new place, then deleting it from the old one.

[jimtherev]

... moving stuff in the same partition just involved changing "flags", whereas moving between partitions involves reading it, writing it to the new place, then deleting it from the old one.
Borne out by the relative times it takes between one process & the other process (and the hard drive light going mad.)

[Loose rivets]

The above quote is, as I mentioned, is how I understood it. I'll probably never know exactly what happened.

Unfortunately, I left the room having checked the light was flickering.
(Hadn't loaded HDi leds yet.)



The whole operation was kick-started by my running Spiroform's defraggle. The computer shut down on a timer while it was running! I know . . . should have known better. It caused an unrecoverable fault.