Mail Archives: opendos/1999/04/02/16:47:45
Having MS DOS 6.0 FDISK'd and formatted my 1gb formerly
Caldera dos beta 7.03-partitioned drive, I find myself
with a new "challenge."
This disk has not one bad physical cluster from one end
to the other. Nothing kinky ever has been done to the
disk--no FAT-32, no Warp, no PartitionMagic, no file
compression, etc. Only Caldera FDISK, which strangled
MS DOS, thus of course preventing win95 installation,
apparently as the consequence of the bugs Charles Dye
carefully analyzed in a report he submitted to Caldera
and posted to the Delorie OpenDos mailing list.
My partitioning, old Caldera and new MS:
type status Caldera type Caldera MS total alloc units
---- b - - - ------------------- -mb-------- --mb Caldera--------MS
cpq
diag n 1 3.9 3.9 4
----- - - - - ------------------- ----------- ---- -----------------
dos a 2 1 C: 16B (BigDOS >32 mb) 120 120 120 30,709 61,359
dos n 3 2 D: 16 (BigDOS >32 mb) 523.3 64.9 65 16,603 33,175
3 E: 16 (<=32mb) 31.4 32 16,072 16,072
4 F: 16 (<=32mb) 31.4 32 16,072 16,072
(!) 5 G: 16B (BigDOS >32 mb) 366.1 364 46,843 46,591
6 H: 16 (<=32mb) 29.5 32 15,066 16,072
---- - - - - ----- ------------------------- ---- -----------------
n free space 385.8 385.8
Logical drives, including C: and D:, all seem to be behaving
predictably except G:. G:--which I've reserved from the
gitgo for win95--is in a lost cluster/wrong file length
vicious cycle I can't resolve. I've MS-reformatted and
relabeled G: twice (it doesn't retain the label). I haven't
a clue what to do about it (but--no offense intended, guys--
but, please, no PartitionMagic suggestions).
I doubt that the symptoms matter very much, but
I'll describe what happens: After chkdsk /f apparently
(not really) clears 2 lost clusters in 2 chains on an empty
G:, Norton Disk Doctor reports a lost cluster chain.
If NDD is told to del the cluster, NDD says it has
but it hasn't, and keeps generating the same error msg
till it's told to assign the cluster to a file. Then it
gives the drive a clean bill of health and chkdsk detects
an invalid cluster in G:\FILE0000._DD, then G:\FILE0000._DD
has an incorrect length. After chkdsk /f purports to fix
G:\FILE0000._DD, NDD says \file0000._dd has size allocation
errors and the drive has lost chains. NDD claims to fix
the file length and assigns the chain to UNKNOWN (a new
one on me), but in fact generates the same msgs over and
over. Deleting G:\FILE0000._DD takes us back to the
beginning of the vicious cycle.
Is this an MS fdisk /mbr moment? Heeeeelp! Please? --Fisher
======================================= adpFisher <yesss AT escape DOT com> nyc
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