amemjm@vax.oxford.ac.uk (06/28/91)
Re: Not booting from HD Hi, I too had this problem: I have a 40M WD harddisk, and tried to reformat it to 5x8M partitions (don't ask why!) under DOS3.3. The format/sys went Ok, but unbootable! Reformatting to 1x32, 1x8 worked fine. I have no idea why, but i suspect that the underlying location or size of the partition table was altered by the re-format. Yes, I did try a low-level format, to no avail. And after a few minutes (yup minutes!) the whole disk became cross-linked in the 5x8 format. interestingly, the reformat to 1x32, 1x8 restored the data fully, including the crosslinked files. Moral: if it works, don't mess! The only thing I can suggest is formatting the primary DOS partition to be as large as your DOS version allows, ie 32M in 3.3. regards, Mark McI
hdrw@ibmpcug.co.uk (Howard Winter) (06/30/91)
In article <1991Jun28.114414.856@vax.oxford.ac.uk> amemjm@vax.oxford.ac.uk writes: > I too had this problem: I have a 40M WD harddisk, and tried to reformat it to > 5x8M partitions (don't ask why!) under DOS3.3. The format/sys went Ok, but > unbootable! Reformatting to 1x32, 1x8 worked fine. I have no idea why, but i > suspect that the underlying location or size of the partition table was altered > by the re-format. Yes, I did try a low-level format, to no avail. And after a > few minutes (yup minutes!) the whole disk became cross-linked in the 5x8 > format. interestingly, the reformat to 1x32, 1x8 restored the data fully, > including the crosslinked files. Moral: if it works, don't mess! I suspect DOS 3.3 only expects 4 partitions per physical drive. I don't know this for certain, but System Sleuth shows four entries in the partition table regardless of the number of partitions in use. I would like to know if this is actually the case, as I've just received a new 200M drive and was going to partition it in 32MB slices, which means seven. Perhaps I ought to upgrade to DOS 5 (only recently available here) and go for larger partitions - any ideas, folks? Thanks for anything, Howard. -- Automatic Disclaimer: The views expressed above are those of the author alone and may not represent the views of the IBM PC User Group. -- hdrw@ibmpcug.Co.UK Howard Winter 0W21' 51N43'