re: Win98 and Hard Disc Partitions - more details
Friday, October 19, 2007 at 10:50 am
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Alan
(16 messages posted)
Hi Ed, and thanks for your reply.
I failed to make everything absolutely clear, please accept my apologies!
The first thing to note is that I have three physical drives on the PC - the C: (5GB)
drive is fine, and holds the OS (Win98). The other two drives were set up for data
(D: drive - 40GB) and for programs (E: drive - 10GB).
My problems have arisen since trying to install Win98SE on C: - an action which seems
to have made changes to D:.
I'm aware of the "hidden" partitions used by Dell, etc. but there is no such partition
on my C: drive, which I partitioned (making a single partition) and formatted when
I first put Win98 on it (FDISK identifies this as PRI DOS and it is assigned logical
drive letter C:). Similarly there were only single partitions on each of the other
drives - until the failed Win98SE installation. The Win98SE disc was an OEM disc
so it is quite possible that it started by partitioning the drive to put manufacturer-specific
files there - but I don't understand why it wrote to my D: drive.
As far as using Seagate diagnostics is concerned; I had the tools to hand, and they
provide gneric tests as well as specific ones for Seagate drives and I have every
confidence in the results they've given me; but of course if I can find any WD tools
to do a similar test I shall use them. But I'm pretty certain now that my data are
intact, the problem lies with partitioning, so I just (just?) need to get the partitioning
sorted out (!). Hence my question about the risks involved in using FDISK to delete
a partition that I don't want and I don't believe contains anything that I need to
keep.
On your other points:
>I don't actually understand how Windows 98 can boot, if your Drive C: is a non-DOS
partition.
<
see above: Win98 is on my logical C: drive which is on another physical drive.
>Nor do I understand how you can have 18GB of data in a 2GB partition. Presumably,
you have "forgotten to mention" that you use disk compression software?
<
No compression, the 2GB partition is the new rogue one on my 40GB drive; the data
is presumably in the remaining 38GB partition, which FDISK reports as having a size
of 4MB.
Thanks for the suggestion about using Ghost to make a backup - would you expect it
to work, given that most things I've pointed at the disc fail to find anything there
with the exception of the seagate utilities?
Alan
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