[ale] Hard Drive Odditites

[Mike Gregoire]

Hi all,
I have a question about fdisk and partitioning a large hard drive.

I'm sorry for droning, but I thought I would described how I got to where I
am now,  in case it helps.

I recently went through a hardware upgrade.  Replaced a 486 motherboard,
and Cirrus chipset video card with a Micron, Pentium 166 motherboard, and a
video card with an S3 chip set.  I didn't see how that would affect my
Seagate 1.6GB IDE drive.

Anyway when I first went to boot it up winbloze came up with some expected
hardware/files missing errors.  I was never able to get it to boot in a
safe mode to fixe the problems.  Each time I did, the file missing errors
increased.  I finally used a recovery floppy (too late at that point) and
found whole subdirectorys missing.  Scandisk recovered some of them, but
not fully.  I tried to boot to Linux and got a CRC error.  I was able to
boot off a boot floppy and mount the partition as root.

By this time my windows partition was trashed.  I have an old 540MB drive
that had Windoze/Linux on it that I through in as master and was able to
boot up.  Between Linux and windows, I got all of my personal files and
shareware off the ailing drive and onto the older one.  I figured I would
wipe the disk and start over.  I ran fdisk in linux and wiped out all the
partitions.  So far so good.  I then tried to create 4 partition.  2 dos
partitions, a linux partition, and a linux swap partition.  The first two
partitions go fine, but when I create the 3 partition, I get overlap from
the second partition, and when I create the 4th partition I get overlap
with the 3rd partition.  The fdisk table sectors look something like this:

     Partition                              BEGIN        START       END
                     1                                              1
1               1016
                     2                                          1017
1017           2041
                     3                                           1024
2042           3066
                     4                                          2048
3067           3146

To get my wife back up and running, I used windows fdisk, created the first
partition and  loaded windows and the ISP software.
Is there any advanced functions in fdisk, or any other utilities to clean
up my harddrive?
Has anyone seen this kind of thing before?

I talked to one guy who has a small computer shop,  he says he has seen
relatively new hard drives start doing flakey things, and running all the
utilities that he had, such as Norton disk utilities and such showed the
disk as being good, but the only end solution was to replace the drive.  I
guess if I have to throw in the towel and get a new drive I will.

Michael Gregoire