kenb@techsup.UUCP (08/27/88)
i'm reading under a friend's account, so flame the signature if necessary :-) regarding your track 0 errors, it kind of depends on how/where you are getting them. if you can get a low-level format on the drive (whatever your DOS calls it, there seems to be a wide variance in naming), you can cheat a little bit during the partitioning process and put the start of the partition further into the drive. in other words, instead of starting partition 1 at track 0, start it at track 5 (or whereever the disk stops giving you problems.) then, do a high-level format on the partition as usual. DOS will boot off the active partition on your hard drive, and doesn't much care where it starts (i.e. you could conceivably create 4 partitions and activate the last so that it would be your boot drive). i can't recommend this as a permanent fix to your problem (if it applies to your case), but it's probably not bad as an interim (sic?) solution. i imagine it's better than living totally devoid of hard drives... :-) of course, if cylinder 0 is so wrecked that you can't even get the boot block onto it, this won't work.... cheers, valerie see ...techsup!qat!valsee (blame me, not the owner of this account!)