Mail Archives: opendos/2001/03/14/02:55:05
I always recommend to read :
"http://web.inter.nl.net/hcc/J.Steunebrink/bioslim.htm"
Joe.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rob McGee [SMTP:i812 AT iname DOT com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 14 March 2001 17:29
> To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
> Subject: [ot] disk geometry mismatch?
>
> ** This isn't even remotely DR-DOS related. But if anyone can figure out
> ** this problem, it would be you people. :) Replies off list would be
> ** very much appreciated. (Or on list if you think it's interesting.)
>
> This is indeed a puzzlement. Our eldest kid got a gift computer. It
> cruised along okay for months, despite a few warning signs: RAM failed
> POST, unable to warm reboot, didn't report disk size and free
> information as an SMB share. But it would easily go at least 1-3 days
> between reboots, and considering it was running Win95 (OSR2) that is not
> too bad. So I blew off doing anything about the problems.
>
> Sometime yesterday, while unattended, it died. I had seen it running a
> screensaver in the morning. She came to do something in the afternoon
> but got no picture. When she turned it on for me I could tell it wasn't
> booting: no video initialization, not even a beep code error.
>
> I tried disconnecting everything but the video: cards, power & interface
> cables. I swapped the RAM. I swapped the video card. I swapped the CPU
> (yes, absolutely sure the jumpers were correct.) Still no flicker, still
> no beep. 'E's pinin' for the fjords. Beautiful bird, the Norwegian Blue.
>
> I put most of the same peripherals on a different motherboard with a
> different CPU and RAM. In getting it to work, physically, I found I
> could no longer access the hard drive. It's a WDC AC35100L which is
> C/H/S 10672/15/63, LBA'ed to 627/255/63. Identify drive from a Linux
> boot message says "10085040 sectors (5164MB)".
>
> DOS fdisk said: "C: partition 1, active, PRI DOS type, no volume label,
> 4918MB, system unknown, usage 100%." It goes on to say the total disk
> space is 4910MB, 8 less than the partition. That sounds odd. Figuring
> "(sectors * 512) / 1024^2" I get 4924.3359MB.
>
> I had a CD of Norton Util. 95 v. 2 (FAT32-aware) and tried ndd.exe. It
> offered to try to recover a partition of 812MB. I declined the offer and
> tried diskedit.exe instead. The first 63 sectors were all 0's. (63 spt,
> of course. Is that normal?)
>
> The 64th sector showed what looked to my untrained eye like some
> filesystem information. There was a string "FAT32" and the volume label
> as it was before the crash. I asked diskedit to try to create a virtual
> filesystem of this, and again, it offered something in the 800MB range.
> Furthermore it said it would be FAT16. But that's not right, it was all
> in one big FAT32 partition.
>
> I tried changing some of the parameters around, but could not find
> anything that worked. Since I really don't know what I am doing I feel
> like I'm looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Somewhere
> along in there I tried "fdisk /mbr" too.
>
> Finally this afternoon I came up with the hypothesis of a disk geometry
> mismatch. That some parameters had been manually entered in the dead
> motherboard's CMOS settings, and they weren't quite correct, but close
> enough that the drive went along with it.
>
> Does this hypothesis sound right? If so is there anywhere I might be
> able to find a clue about the disk geometry parameters used? I'm afraid
> that my "fdisk /mbr" might have rendered the thing unbootable though.
>
> It's nothing major, but if there's any way to recover this I sure would
> like to do it.
>
> If you read this far, thank you for your time. If not, I'm sorry for the
> disruption. :)
>
> Rob - /dev/rob0
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