Partition holding temporary folder failed on Windows XP, how do I deal with it?

Question

I have a Windows XP box and on boot it first complained that there was no bootable disk. After checking the power connections to the drives and they all checked out, I tried booting again and it did so, but very slowly. Eventually Windows started but it was extremely slow, like minute-per-click slow.

After doing a lot of tests and diagnostics, I figured out that the problem was that something was wrong with the partition that holds the temporary files. I have my main drive (the one with the OS on it) in several partitions. One has the OS itself, another has application files, and a third has a single folder which is for temporary files. In Windows XP, the location of the temporary folder is indicated by two environment variables (TEMP and TMP).

So, I made a new "temp" folder on a completely different drive and pointed those two variables to that new folder and rebooted. The machine then started and behaved normally.

I have no doubt that the failure of the old temp partition was because my browser writes and rewrites zillions of files to that folder constantly.

So, now my problem is that I have essentially a dead/toxic partition. For example, if I try to open the Temp drive using Multicommander, then the whole application freezes up. Since this partition is on the same drive as the main OS, it makes me nervous. The question is how to deal with this toxic partition.

My first inclination is to add a whole new drive to the machine, boot the machine using Knoppix, then copy the Windows System partition to the new drive using dd, then delete the old temp partition. Basically this will ghost my existing OS (and all its registry settings to the new drive, so I can hopefully boot the machine from the new drive. One issue might be a drive letter assignment could screw things up.

Anyway, exactly what the best procedure here is not clear to me. How can I deal with this toxic partition and set things up, so a similar problem will not occur in the future?

Answer 1

After making a full disk backup, you could try using GParted Live to delete the partition, and optionally create a new partition in the same space or move and resize the remaining two partitions to fill the entire drive. GParted Live is a simple usb-bootable Linux distribution designed specifically for creating, deleting, moving, and resizing partitions on your main boot drives. Using this type of bootable utility on an external USB is preferable because it allows us to format partitions on your boot drive without having to worry about

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Installing GParted Live to a USB Stick

The easiest way to install GParted Live to a USB is to use Tuxboot, a tool for installing utilities like Clonezilla Live and GParted Live to USB. Here's a direct download link for Windows. First, you need to prepare your USB stick. Open Disk Management from the start menu, select your usb stick, and erase all partitions on it. Next, create a new partition formatted as FAT32. Open the Tuxboot executable, select gparted-live-stable in the top left drop-down menu, click update, and select the latest version available for AMD64 Architectures. Next, select your USB drive letter at the bottom, and click OK to begin installing.

Next, boot into your USB (specific instructions will vary here based on your motherboard), Select "GParted Live (Default Settings)", hit enter a few times at the prompts, and then the GParted application will pop up.

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Rundown on How Linux Handles Hard Drive Partitions

Since the utility we will be using is actually a basic Linux OS, we'll need to understand some things about the way Linux handles hard drives and partitions. In Windows, each mounted drive partition is assigned a letter - C: for your boot partition, D: for the next one, and so on. Each letter corresponds to only one partition, and there is no notation for what drive the partition is on.

Things work differently in Linux. Each drive, regardless of how many partitions are on it, is assigned a "logical name" that follows this pattern: /dev/sda for the first drive, /dev/sdb for the second, and so on. These logical names are actually paths to files that represent the drive's raw data - /dev/ is the folder they are stored in, and sda is the filename for "scsi drive A".

Likewise, partitions have logical names as well, following this pattern: /dev/sda1 for the first partition on the first drive, /dev/sda2 for the second partition on the first drive, /dev/sdb1 for the first partition on the second drive, and so on. Now that you understand a few things about how drives and partitions are identified, you can get on to reformatting your drive.

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Deleting Your Corrupted Partition

At the top right of the GParted window, you will see a drop down menu that says /dev/sda. This menu is for selecting different storage drives. Since you said your corrupted partition is the last partition on your main drive, you likely won't need to change this to a different drive. Below the toolbar, you will see a visual representation of the drive's partition order and relative sizes, and below that a list of all your drive's partitions. To delete the faulty partiton, select it at the bottom of the partition list, then hit delete. Press the apply button in the toolbar to run the command. You should now have a bunch of empty space at the end of your drive.

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Creating a New NTFS Partition

To create a new partition, click the "New" button in the toolbar. Use the sliders to resize the partition however you like. Don't touch any of the options on the left, but on the right you should set "Partition Name" and "Label" to the same value, which should be the name of your partition. ("Temp" or the like in your case.) Also change the "File System" drop-down menu to NTFS, or alternatively FAT32 if you need the partition to be writable by other OS's. Click next once you are done, then click "Apply" in the toolbar to write the changes to your disk.

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Resizing Your Existing Partitions

If you choose to resize your existing partitions to fill the drive instead of simply recreating your temp partition, things get a tad bit more complicated. In order to expand your boot partition, you will first need to move your Application Files partition to the right in order to make room for the boot partition to expand. Select your rightmost partition and select "Resize/Move" in the toolbar. Drag it all the way to the end of the drive, then optionally expand it to the left, leaving enough space for your other partition(s) to expand. You should NOT create any new partitions in the newly-created empty space, as this could break things very easily.

Before you click apply, you should also queue the the resizing of any other partitions on the drive, as this will take some time. Select the partition just to the left of the partition you just moved, and move/resize it as you wish.

Repeat this step until you get to your boot partition. This partition should not be moved, as this can make the drive not bootable. You may, however, expand the partition to the right without moving it.

Once you have queued all your move/resize commands, hit "Apply" to write all the changes to the disk.

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Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any issues or questions.

Answer 2

You should first make a backup of your data, or better of the whole drive.

As your temp partition contains only temporary files that you don't need, the simplest solution would be to format that partition to get rid of the files. After that you should be able to use the partition again.