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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Ontracks' Dynamic Disk Overlay
  • Date: Sat, 14 May 2005 16:15:33 +0000 (UTC)

I went ahead and wrote zeros over the first 512 bytes and then I could boot from floppy disk instead of just hard drive. (I had to first keep hitting the space bar while booting in order to boot into linux from 2-floppy BL2).

Then PQMagic told me "Disk Manager detected but not running. Can't initialize the engine". So I zeroed 1024 bytes with BL2 dd.

I then tried BL2 fdisk on it 'Fatal error - bad signature on partition table'.


I booted with FreeDOS and was told during boot 'illegal partition table'.
fdisk - First hard disk sector zero has no boot sector ID.
Intialize disk? Yes.
I made a DOS partition. FreeDOS fdisk found only 503MB now that I had no DDO to make it 1.9G. I deleted that partition.


Then I dug out the Maxtor diagnostic disk I had downloaded and made and ran powermax.exe (it is a boot disk with Caldera DR-DOS). I did a quick low-level format and it zeroed the first 300MB and last 100MB.

I ran their quick 90-sec test and it took at least 10 minutes and told me the disk was failing and to back up all my data. TEST FAILED

Spinrite got normal access speeds, unlike a very slow disk someone once gave us that was really failing.

PQMagic again found one 503MB disk with 510 cylinders. (BL2 fdisk had found 1946 cylinders, or 1.9GB).

Then I ran BL3 fdisk and it told me that there were 1946 cylinders and old versions of LILO and OS/2 and DOS fdisk could only handle 1024 and would get confused, and there was also an Invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 which will be corrected by write. I wrote and deleted partition 1 in DOS format. Linux detected this drive as 1.9G. I then made a 200MB and a 1.7GB linux partition and wrote the partition table.

FreeDOS booted without any complaint about the partition table this time.

PQMagic again found one 503MB disk, with two linux partitions on it totalling 1.9GB.

powermax again told me the disk was failing. I have not yet run the burnin test (we will go away and let it run). But I may use this as a linux disk rather than a 503MB DOS disk, after also doing a more thorough check with spinrite.

Perhaps with the correct software I could have removed the DDO and had something 1.9G in DOS, but I suspect they made the drive so that is not possible.

What might zeroing the first 300MB and the last 100MB have done which
zeroing only the first 1024 bytes did not do, which made this drive usable with BL3 fdisk? Was part of the DDO at the end not the start of the drive?


On Fri, 13 May 2005, David Moberg wrote:

----- Original Message -----
From: "sindi keesan" <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>

Can I somehow wipe out this monster with dd from BL instead? Where
might the DDO be located and can I just write zeros over that part?
Is the MBR the first 1024 bytes, or half that? Could I damage
anything important, irretrievably, by trying dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1?

Could you back up everything and wipe the whole disk instead? Writing
to the MBR is almost guaranteed to destroy any partitioning that you
may have on there.

David

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