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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Spinrite detected an unused 'gap' at the end of the other DOS drive.  DOS 
recognizes the drive as 3GB, spinrite says we are using only 18% of it.
I thought a 1998 BIOS could recognize 8BG drives.  This appears to be a 
16GB and will be used in our fastest linux computer once we make a drive 
cage for it.


So why is DOS recognizing 503MB of a 1.9GB drive and 3GB of a 16GB drive?
DOS also recognized only 3GB of a currently-linux drive (unplugged while 
testing the Maxtor 1.9GB) which I will check with linux - maybe it is 
20GB.

Now I can stop worrying about why spinrite does not like two of our drives 
(and the third one I can stop worrying about because it is dead).

On Sat, 14 May 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> I have a 1.9GB drive from which I removed a DDO in the MBR (or maybe at the 
> end of the drive) which DOS programs recognize as being 503MB.
>
> This includes FreeDOS Fdisk and PQMagic.
>
> Powermax.exe for Maxtor did a 90-sec quick test which is FAILED, but the 
> burnin passed and I have a certified error-free drive.
>
> Spinrite is happy with the speeds but it does not like the size of the second 
> partition, which is larger than the drive size.  I have another drive 
> (currently used for linux) with three partitions, the third of which is 
> 'larger than the drive size'.  I think we took EZ-DRIVE off of this one.  I 
> am instructed not to run Spinrite on it before fixing the 'problem' (which is 
> a DOS problem only).
>
> Spinrite just also passed this 1.9GB drive - no defects.
>
> So the explanation is not that the partition table is bad, but that DOS is 
> not correctly reading it somehow.
>
> On this most recent drive, I have a 200MB and a 1.7GB linux partition and DOS 
> thinks the drive is 503MB.
>
> The summary of this is that if you take a DDO off of a drive, you may not be 
> able to use more than 503MB of it in DOS but it works fine in linux. Don't 
> believe DOS diagnostic programs.
>
> We have one other drive (used for linux) which is not found by:
> Spinrite
> LTools
> Syschk (part of it)
>
> I still need a 1G replacement DOS drive.  We have a little arrangement with 
> the place we used to volunteer whereby we fix tape decks and CD players and 
> get free small stuff that they have too many of.
>
> But I know now that I do NOT need to replace my other linux drive with 
> overlarge partition, which has worked perfectly, and I can even use that 
> partition now.
>
> Can anyone explain why even after removing the DDO, DOS won't detect the full 
> drive size, on a more recent BIOS that should work with 2G?
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org