Microsoft KB Archive/221799

= Drive Letters Assigned to Unsupported Partition Types =

Article ID: 221799

Article Last Modified on 2/27/2007

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APPLIES TO


 * Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
 * Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
 * Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Edition

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This article was previously published under Q221799



SYMPTOMS
After you upgrade to Windows 2000, drive letters may be assigned to partitions that previously did not have drive letters. When you try to gain access to one of the partitions, you may receive the following error message:

The volume does not contain a recognized file system.

Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted.

When you view the Logical Disk Manager (LDM) snap-in, the partition has a status of "healthy" but does not have a file system type.



CAUSE
This issue occurs because Windows 2000 assigns drive letters to partition types that are not natively supported by Windows 2000.



RESOLUTION
To work around this issue, use Logical Disk Manager to un-assign drive letters for partition that do not contain valid file systems.



MORE INFORMATION
Earlier versions of Microsoft Windows NT normally do not assign drive letters to unsupported partition types. One partition type Windows 2000 assigns a drive letter to is a "type 84" partition. A type 84 partition is considered a Suspend to Disk (S2D) partition. Many computer manufacturers store the suspended computer's state in an S2D partition.

Windows 2000 does not support the Suspend to Disk feature.

Positively identifying the type of partition requires a disk sector editing tool such as Dskprobe.exe so you can look at the on-disk partition tables system indicator byte. There is no way to view these system ID bytes using Logical Disk Manager.

IMPORTANT: Once a basic disk is converted to a dynamic disk, the disk partitioning information including the partition type is migrated to the Logical Disk Manager database and is no longer available for viewing using the Dskprobe.exe tool.

Additional query words: ldm veritas

Keywords: kberrmsg kbprb KB221799

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