Baslinux mailing list

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

On Sat, 14 May 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> 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.

We plugged back in the DOS drive that 'failed' and it is working now, 
along with the second drive (linux), which recognizes the DOS drive as 
1.2GB.

Syschk finds one drive of 503MB and then logical drives totalling 1.2GB.
Spinrite complains that partitions 2 3 and 4 are larger than the drive.
PQMagic warns us that something is wrong with the drive geometry and not 
to do any operations on the partitions until we back up our data, and it 
also finds 503MB.

I must have used linux fdisk to make DOS partitions totalling 1.2GB on 
this drive.  They seem to work. Would they have somehow caused the 
'failure' or might it be tarnished contacts on the IDE cable?

Anyway, it seems to be possible to get rid of EZ-DRIVE and ONTRACK'S DDO 
(by low-level format, which I needed the Maxtor diagnostic disk for in the 
case of the Maxtor drive) but then DOS only finds 503MB, however you can 
partition with linux fdisk to use the whole disk in linux and even in DOS 
(at least for the 1.2G drive).

So linux fdisk (I used BL3) can be used to make DDO drives recognized 
(sort of) even in DOS.  DOS programs have been working fine on the 1.2GB.

Why did the dd approach not work?  Should I have done the whole disk, or 
the last 100MB as well as the MBR, or even the last 1024 bytes?