[ale] Hard Drive Odditites

[Eric Z. Ayers]

Gee, where have I seen this before?  Just last weekend I completely
screwed up my hard drive by moving it from the 3rd hard drive to the 1st
hard drive in my system. My hard drive is a Maxtor 5.1GB

My incredibly intelligent BIOS decided that it needed to use a different
mode on the hard drive if it is installed as the first hard drive in the
system, so it came up looking like it had a different
geometry.  There were no settings for me to control this.  My solution
was to repartion under Linux and reinstall everything.  

I think it can make a different if you boot up with lilo's linear
option. I had been doing that with the third hard drive, but had no luck
with LINEAR when I moved it to be the first hard drive.  I don't
completely understand how all that works, despite reading several
diatribes on the subject.  All I know is that the data on my hard drive
appeard to be smoked.


-Eric.


Mike Gregoire writes:
 > 
 > 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
 > 
 >