fdisk still works right?

[davesaudio]

fdisk still works right?

80 gig maxtor cheapie
nforce2 MB
w98se boot disk
downloaded the latest fdisk /patch which is supposed to support larger drives

I can take my 80gig and make my first partition ~31gig so far so good

when I make the second extended partition ~31gig and reboot
fdisk no longer recognizes the partitions, says they are invalid

at this point go use the maxtor utility, do a low level then recertify(test)

drive tests good at this point and we start all over again.

even tried a promise controller in case maxtor's statement that
their utils don't like the nforce chipset also applied to fdisk

confused

 

[mmmm]

Switch to Windows XP and forget about all problems (stability, large partitions, system crashing, drivers, compatibility...). Switching from FAT32 to NTFS (in WinXP) is a MUST! BTW, when you start booting win xp from install cd (to install it to computer), at one point you'll get a screen where you can directly format even new blank HDD (no need for fdisk any more), and that works fine!

Compared to any previous win9x + winme OS, WinXP really deserves to be named Operating System (under NTFS of course - sudden power shortages happened to me numerous times for past year, and NEVER during next boot WinXP checked HDD! I'm using NTFS. When I tried to manually check HDD after such situation - chkdsk found nothing wrong

 

[davesaudio]

well, if you have ever crashed an ntfs based os and had to install
another drive and another copy of nt to get your files back....

fat32 and ghosted images still hold great convenience/redundancy

 

[Gillbot]

Agreed although there is a NTFS driver for dos you can toss onto a floppy to make the drive readable.

Originally posted by: davesaudio
well, if you have ever crashed an ntfs based os and had to install
another drive and another copy of nt to get your files back....

fat32 and ghosted images still hold great convenience/redundancy

 

[davesaudio]

was on the back burner - time to do something about this,
will try this this from Maxtor's KB (may be of interest to others)

quote:
I have multiple partitions and my last partition regularly disappears, what can I do about it?

answer
There are two workarounds for this phenomenon:

1- Only use one primary DOS partition.

2- Using FDISK, follow the steps below when partitioning the drive:
Create a primary DOS partition with the desired size.
Reboot
Create an extended DOS partition using 99% of the available space remaining instead of 100%
Reboot
Create as many logical DOS drives as required, but with a reboot between each logical drive created.

unquote

opening the floor to other suggestions?

Dave

 

[dunkster]

I had problems attempting to set up a new 80Gb HD with the FDISK version from Win98SE, due to disk-size limit with that version. Microsoft has a new version of FDISK that works with larger HDs - I used that version successfully.

Hope this helps!