waldman2@husc8.HARVARD.EDU (Bruce Waldman) (11/16/89)
Recently I found that I was unable to access my 20 mb hard disk
on my Zenith SuperSport 286. If I booted from a floppy, everything
ran fine, but any reference to C: elicited a message stating I
was using an invalid drive. If I tried to boot from the hard disk,
I was shunted into the SETUP menu and couldn't get out. The Zenith
service person says I have destroyed my partition. Could someone
explain to me what actually happened? Sorry if this is a naive
question, but I thought partitions were used to access disks with
>30MB or for splitting physical disks into >1 logical disks. This
is all occurring with Zenith MS-DOS 3.3 Plus.
Bruce Waldman, bw@harvarda.bitnetunkydave@shumv1.uucp (David Bank) (11/17/89)
In article <3185@husc6.harvard.edu> waldman2@husc8.UUCP (Bruce Waldman) writes: >Recently I found that I was unable to access my 20 mb hard disk >on my Zenith SuperSport 286. If I booted from a floppy, everything >ran fine, but any reference to C: elicited a message stating I >was using an invalid drive. If I tried to boot from the hard disk, >I was shunted into the SETUP menu and couldn't get out. The Zenith >service person says I have destroyed my partition. Could someone >explain to me what actually happened? Sorry if this is a naive >question, but I thought partitions were used to access disks with >>30MB or for splitting physical disks into >1 logical disks. This >is all occurring with Zenith MS-DOS 3.3 Plus. > >Bruce Waldman, bw@harvarda.bitnet I make these statements in reference to MFM/RLL drives on MS/PC-DOS machines. Everything else is right out. All hard drives have partition tables, whether or not they have been virtually configured (i.e. more that one logical drive per physical drive). The partition table is, unless I am grossly mistaken, created by the FDISK routine in DOS. How did you kill your partition table??? Dunno. A power failure in the middle of a disk write could have done it. I cringe to mention it, but partition-eating viruses do exist (but lacking corroborating evidence, blaming the event on a virus is alarmist). "Weak" media where the partition table was located could cause it to "vanish" "Normal" user programs should have little use for the partition table; DOS is usually the only program to visit it (discounting such things as Norton and Spinwrite and that ilk). Unless you have a utility program capable of rebuilsing your partition table, you're pretty much out of luck. Your disk is gone until it is reformatted. It IS possible to recover data, given that all you have to do is repartition the drive and then run "Format" again. Since those two proccedures don't actually mess with the data areas of the drive too much, you may be able to (laboriously and expensively) recover data. This sort of situation is what backups are for. Good luck! Unky Dave unkydave@shumv1.ncsu.edu
andrews@hpcupt1.HP.COM (Edward E. Andrews) (11/18/89)
I've had this problem on my AT-clone when the CMOS get trashed. In order to recover I ran the SETUP program and then the disk manager. It works every time.