[ale] Hard Drive Odditites

[Geoffrey Myers]

Mike Gregoire wrote:
>

No answers here, but some suggestions/ideas.  First, when you changed
motherboards, you've changed bios, so there may be something there
causing a problem.  I added a 1.2 gig hard drive, and created very
similar partitions as you have and had no problem.  Sorry, not much
help, but maybe some clues.
 
> 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

-- 
Until later:
Geoffrey Myers   geof at abraxis.com