suhaimi@uop.edu (Muhammad Selamat) (04/12/91)
Hi, I'm going to put my Coherent to my new 40M HD (Segate 157A) and I want to know if there any difficulties on installing Coherent on it. Right now I've Coherent partitions on my WD Caviar 80M IDE HD. What I want to do right now is to delete Coherent partitions on my 80M HD. I have heard that it is difficult to delete Coherent partitions (and it happened to me too last time when I want change to a new 80M HD.. at last I reformated it using WD special formater and I know it dangerous to do that!). Any help is really appreciated... Thanks in advance. -mid- hamid@uop.edu uop!mhm!hamid
ins_wayne@actew.oz.au (04/14/91)
In article <280553ac.1294@uop.uop.edu>, suhaimi@uop.edu (Muhammad Selamat) writes: > Hi, > I'm going to put my Coherent to my new 40M HD (Segate 157A) and > I want to know if there any difficulties on installing Coherent > on it. Right now I've Coherent partitions on my WD Caviar 80M > IDE HD. What I want to do right now is to delete Coherent > partitions on my 80M HD. I have heard that it is difficult to > delete Coherent partitions (and it happened to me too last time > when I want change to a new 80M HD.. at last I reformated it using > WD special formater and I know it dangerous to do that!). Ouch. Yes, you need to be very careful with IDEs. I played around with Coherent for a few months and sold my copy a while back. The most effective way I found to eliminate the "Mark Williams" boot message was to edit the boot track with the Norton Utility. Just put NULs in the first few bytes, then partition and SYS it again. Voila! No more Mark Williams messages. If you want to trash the contents of the disk entirely, the best bet is to fill the partition table with NULs. At least the first 128 bytes. If all you want to do is delete the partitions, the Norton Utility has a partition table editor. Disk Manager can also handle the MWC entries properly. BEWARE: back up everything before you start hacking disks in absolute sector mode! If you are reformatting the entire drive anyway, this avoids the necessity to low-level format the drive. However, normal MFM and RLL drives *should* be low-level formatted about twice a year for optimum performance. Not speed, reliability and integrity are the questions here. > Any help is really appreciated... Thanks in advance. Hope this helps. DO A BACKUP FIRST! If you have two drives, disconnect the other drive if possible. It could save an embarrassing mishap! :-) > hamid@uop.edu > uop!mhm!hamid -- Wayne Myles Email: ins_wayne@actew.oz.au, wsm@ccadfa.cc.adfa.oz.au System Manager, Snail: GPO Box 366, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia. ACT Electricity & Water Ph: +61-6-248-3143 (w) Fax: +61-6-248-3439