cobb@petsd.UUCP (Chris Cobb) (07/30/90)
Keywords: I'm having problems partitioning a hard disk, and hopefully someone can show me the error of my ways. I have an AT compatible running MS/DOS 3.3 with a 40MB hard disk as drive 0. I used to have a 20MB hard disk as drive 1 (worked with no problems), but I just replaced it with an 85MB (unformatted) disk. The disk has 9 heads and 1024 cylinders, and my BIOS supports it. I have two separate formatting programs which both format the disk with no problems. When I tell FDISK to allocate the largest primary DOS extent it can, it allocates 428 cylinders for the extent (31MB and some change). When I tell FDISK to allocate an extended DOS extent, it allocates 1022 cylinders for the extent, with each logical drive being allocated as 428 cylinders. So far, so good. The problem is when I run FORMAT against any logical drive on that disk, FORMAT replies, "Invalid partition table/Format aborted". FDISK now reports that the disk contains no active partitions. For chuckles I tried allocating an extent of 200 cylinders, and that formatted fine. I did not have enough time to play around to see how many cylinders I could specify before FORMAT would barf. I heard that version 4.01 of MS/DOS does not limit the partition size of hard disks. Is this my answer, or is there something else I may be missing? My experience tells me I should not be having this problem in the first place. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. -- +==================================+==========================================+ | UUCP: {att,princeton}!petsd!cobb | What's another word for "thesaurus"? | | or cobb@petsd.tinton.ccur.com | -- Steven Wright | +==================================+==========================================+