Partitioning/formatting fun...

...not.

First, let me set the stage.

Three SCSI drives. Drive 0 has a boot manager and two primary ~4GB partitions, one for each operating system.

Drive 1 has a 512MB logical partition at the end of the drive, FAT16 formatted, happily accessable to both operating systems. This "common" partition contains some programs which are run from either operating system, and therefore must be assigned the same drive letter in each.

Drive 2 is an 8GB pain in the butt.

I can do anything I want with it with OS/2's FDISK & FORMAT, which suggests to me that there is nothing wrong with the drive.

Under Win98 however, regardless of what combination of partitions I try, the first logical drive within an extended DOS partition will not remain formatted after a re-boot. Second and subsequent logical drives are fine, but never the first. Sometimes it (the first) won't format at all, with FORMAT reporting a bad partition table.

To suit my needs, I would like to create the maximum allowable size of FAT32 logical drive possible. It must be a logical drive in order to refrain from bumping the letter assigned to the "common" partition I mentioned earlier.

Any suggestions?

TIA!

 

Hi dguy,

See if you find diagnostics utilites for that drive. Sounds like whatever you are using to partition/format is not reading the drive properly.
Suggest the SCSI controller manufacturer and the drive manufacturer.
See if you can find another program that will partition/format. Check that the information that it sees corresponds to the manufacturers specifications.

Matt

 

Over the weekend I tried a set of manufacturer-provided drivers for the SCSI HA, but without any improvement unfortunately.

I hadn't thought of tracking down any vendor-provided diagnostic utilities for the drive however--thanks.

More excellent advice. Certainly worth a try, as I've had a long-standing curiosity about Parition Magic. This might be an ideal opportunity to satisfy that curiosity.

The adventure continues...

 

Well that didn't get me anywhere.

The drive in question is a Fujitsu MAB3091SP; I downloaded Fujitsu's SCSI diagnostic software, and it couldn't find a problem with the drive in any of three available tests.

At the moment I'm considering partitioning the drive with a minimal "dummy" partition, followed by a useable drive of the size I need, and just use TweakUI to remove the dummy (unformattable) drive from the Explorer.

Still waiting to get my hands on a copy of Partition Magic or similar to see how that goes, but for the moment this is where I "m at.

As always though, I'm open to further suggestions...

 

Partition Magic may well be able to do the things you need. I have seen it read many drives that Fdisk could not (but not corrupted drives that can only be accessed by utilities). I recall that it has the ability to "hide" a partition as well.
I have a dummy partition on my main IDE HDD and can remove it with Partition Magic when I add another HDD to keep the drive letters in sequence. Maybe the type of thing you are looking to do. If you going to be rearranging drives then PM is well worth having...although a don't get complacent about backing-up your data, if PM crashes then your drive may have to be repartitioned. Also, don't run a large list of procedures for it, I only do one at a time. Can't tell you much more on PM, you should find that it read/fix that Partition Table or it won't. See here (also some SCSI troubleshooting):
http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id2233.cfm

A bit more info I found:
http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread/t-57341.html
http://www.os2forum.or.at/pharmacy/pmagic.html
http://www-level3.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/WinXP/Q_20662852.html

Hope some of this helps
Matt