roger@tc.fluke.COM (Roger Hammerquist) (06/04/91)
Greetings, helpful net people, I just got a copy of WUTIL 3.2, and used it to format both a 10M and a 20M hard drive on a Rainbow (the 10M is a standard DEC drive, but the 20M isn't). After formatting, initializing, and partitioning the disks (using 2 or 3 MS-DOS partitions), I get an non-fatal error message when starting MS-DOS (version 2.11-1), even when loading from the floppy disk. The error message says something about "only 8 Megabytes of the hard disk are usable", but when MS-DOS finishes loading, I seem to be able to use all of the partitions. I've tried all kinds of things to fix this, including reformatting the disk, reinitializing it, repartitioning it, using MS-DOS "FORMAT" and "FORMAT /S" on each partition, copying the new boot loaders, and even setting each of the partitions as the autoboot partition individually. The problem persists on the 20M drive, but seems to have gone away on the 10M drive after the second or third time I formatted it. Does anyone have an idea what's causing this? I'm hesitant to load all the software on the hard disk until I know what's going on. Could it be a bad hard disk controller? Or should I just be using MS-DOS 3.10b instead? :-) Thanks in advance. Roger Hammerquist roger@tc.fluke.COM