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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: RE: [BL] hd problem
  • Date: Sat, 19 Feb 2005 03:02:52 +0000 (UTC)

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005, Jason Chall wrote:

You might hookup a voltmeter and watch the voltages while the disk is
running, especially if you have a meter with a min hold function. The
voltages might be fluctuating only under load. Might also wiggle ribbon
cable while transferring data to see if this causes problems.

I have been accumulating evidence that the controller and the linux drive (hdb) and CD-ROM drive are okay but the DOS drive (hda) has problems with the partition table possibly due to monkey b virus which rewrites the partition table (but keeps a copy elsewhere to fool you with).
1. Spinrite said the four DOS partitions were all larger than the drive.
2. Fdisk said the first partition was 100% of the drive and the other three about 42%. This adds up to about 220%.
3. F-prot found no viruses, but it does not find monkey B, an old DOS virus that we have had before, which at one point made C: disappear while retaining D on a computer.
4. Linux is so far working perfectly if I boot from a floppy disk and use loadlin and kernel on it (bypassing the DOS hd partition table).

Apparently the DOS partition table can affect linux. I have not mounted any DOS drives yet and things are working just fine. I did several dus in a row on the whole linux partition, no problems.

I will go pick up a writeprotected DOS boot disk with killmonk on it from a friend who certifies it to be virus-free tomorrow. If that fails, then I am supposed to repartion/reformat the drive, unless someone has other ideas on how to fix a partition table. This is my drive with Win98 and ghostscript and WORDVIEW on it and FAT32 and I may just put Win98 on a separate computer instead and drag it out when needed to read WORD since I now have linux ghostscript and scanner software.

scandisk and f-prot found no problems (other than a corrupt himem.sys - would this have messed up the partition table or is it just a symptom not a cause?). I have not tried running DOS programs other than f-prot from the hard drive.




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