Help...weird fdisk problem

[Waveslidin]

Trying to fix a laptop for a friend. I am trying to fdisk and reformat his hard drive and reinstall win98. Post goes through fine, all drives are detected. Go through fdisk..enable large disk support...create partition...use whole 6gb for pri dos partition (have also tried fat16 and partitions of various sizes..1024...512...etc...). When I exit fdisk, it tells me the typical hit esc and to reboot and reformat. When i reboot, the partition is gone. No errors while creating the partition, it just doesn't exist. I have tried running fdsik /mbr, used a new hard drive (which the diagnostics run fine on anyway). Was thinking about flashing the bios, but why should I when it was installed and running fine before. Could it be a system board problem? I looked at the connectors and pins to make sure they weren't bent, and everything looked fine. I am having no other problems at all detecting or testing this hard drive...it just doesn't save the partition after reboot. Anyone been here before? Help....please

 

[Lindau]

Could be something concerned with your hard drive, you can try "Norton Disk Doctor", you can download it in the Free Download Area of www.jummpa.com

 

[Waveslidin]

I ran some hard drive diagnostics and everything appears fine. Not only that, it does the same thing with an identical hard drive that was purchased new. Much thanks for any ideas. This one is stumping me good

 

[MOgeeks]

Not sure what you really saying, and according to what you typed,

if you used ALL 6gb for pri dos partition, there will be only one partition or only C drive,

since no disk space is alloted to sec. partition and make

sure that you set the only partition to be Active mode so the computer will boot to the

partition.

Setting active mode is available is the fdisk command.

Hope this helps.

 

[Waveslidin]

When you use the whole disk as a primary partition, it automatically sets it as active. But I have manually set it as active, and then as soon as I reboot, boom, the entire partition is gone. I choose the view partitions option from fdisk after reboot, and it tells me there are no partitions. I am thinking it may be something to do with the controller.

 

[Pederv]

Have you tried using the diags to write 0's to the hard drive?
Can you try using Win2K/XP to fdisk the drive?
Can you use the CHS specs on the hard drive and fdisk it then?
I've had this happen to me, and it's like there's a remnant left on the drive that isn't letting the partition take. Using another fdisk utility fixed it most of the time, there was the Atlas 10K that was actually bad though.
Once you've been able to partition the drive, you should be able to use the Win98 fdisk to enable large disk support.

 

[Waveslidin]

Originally posted by: Pederv
Have you tried using the diags to write 0's to the hard drive?
Like a low level format? Haven't tried that yet, but it did cross my mind.

Can you try using Win2K/XP to fdisk the drive?
Yeah, used a XP boot disk version of fdisk and had the same issue.

Can you use the CHS specs on the hard drive and fdisk it then?
Not quite sure how to do this. But if you would like to explain, I would love to give it a shot

I've had this happen to me, and it's like there's a remnant left on the drive that isn't letting the partition take. Using another fdisk utility fixed it most of the time, there was the Atlas 10K that was actually bad though.
Once you've been able to partition the drive, you should be able to use the Win98 fdisk to enable large disk support.

Hopefully this may be the same issue. Thanks for your help!!!!!!!

 

[Pederv]

CHS (Cylinder Head Sector) is the old way drives were setup. LBA (Logical Block Addressing) is the new way, but most all drives can still run CHS for backwards compatibility. The CHS specs for your drive should be listed on the drive or on the manufacturers web site. Once you get the CHS spec you can go into the bios and enter the values. The drive will show up smaller than when using LBA, so don't be alarmed. Try fdisking, if it takes return the drive to LBA mode and fdisk again. Hopefully this will allow you to get full use of your drive.

If you've tried everything I've suggested and still nothing then the only other thing I can think of is either Norton (or simular product) or trying to put the drive in another system.

Good Luck

 

[Waveslidin]

Will try this. Although, the more that I think about it....why should it matter. I have a new hard drive that does the same thing???????? Ready to throw this pos out the window.

 

[Pederv]

I was thinkin the same thing, but when troubleshooting you tend to develop 2 philosophies. The one for home is "try everything possible, no matter how out there it gets" because you don't want to spend any more than you have to. For work "try the reasonable, too much time on a single project might cost more than replacement".

Before I got W2K the CHS method was what I used on stubborn drives.