HD partitions changed by themselves

Hi,

I have two perhaps related issues. I have been trying to diagnose an issue where the screen sleeps suddenly while in use. This is a story in itself but tonight I ran into another issue- my HD has rearranged the partitions without any input from me. Also, it takes much longer to start up the computer.

I used disk utility on the install disc to "repair disk". While doing this, the screen went to sleep. I could not wake it up but was able to restart using keyboard commands- "command ." to stop anything in progress (it should have been finished anyway), followed by "command Q", and finally the restart shortcut. This worked fine. Everything appeared okay.

Except now the bootcamp partition is very small, and worryingly, on startup my screen hangs at the gray screen for thirty seconds before finally booting up. This used to be a second or two. Disk Utility says all is well.

Any ideas here? I don't really use bootcamp but the fact the partitions rearranged themselves and it's much slower to start I'm a bit worried something got gunked up. Thanks!

Garsun said:

My 1st thought would be "hot corners".
There is a setting to make screen saver active when the mouse is moved to a selected corner.

Click to expand...

The hot corner is what is saving me right now, I use it to bring the screen back to life. This is an ongoing and frustrating problem. I'll have to do a separate post. Really only mentioned it to explain why I was messing around with Disk Utility in the first place.

My thought here is to reset the startup disk using "Startup Disk" in System Preferences. Hunting for a valid OS Can sometimes take awhile.

Click to expand...

Yes! Thanks, that fixed that issue. Now the question is, do my magically resized partitions matter to Time Machine at all? There is a good chance I'll have to wipe and reinstall 10.6.8. If I do this and don't partition the drive will Time Machine be okay with that? I only needed Bootcamp to get stuff off an old PC and don't need it anymore.

I agree, about to order another external drive for just this reason. Thanks for the help.