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Vintage threads from the first ten years

Preparing hard drive for external case

11/14/2005 12:05 PM
Steve A.	Preparing hard drive for external case I picked up an USB2.0 external hard drive enclosure and tried putting in a 200GB Maxtor slave drive from an ex-computer of mine- but I get messages that indicate it is still looking for the Maxtor software that was installed on the master drive. I believe that I did run fdisk /mbr and then ran the Maxtor partitioning software. Any tips on doing this right would be appreciated! The manual for the enclosure is a bit sketchy and leaves out the information that would be specific to each hard drive manufacturer. Perhaps the problem was that I did not unplug all of the other hard drives when I ran the Maxtor software, so if the needed drivers were on the master disk it did not bother copying them to the slave disk??? My other questions have to do with getting the full capacity out of a 200GB hard drive, and making it compatible with all computers. I guess I would proceed with the hard drive plugged in by itself and then set it up as though it would be a permanent not a removeable drive. I was thinking of making the first partition FAT32 so that my older computers would recognize it. Maybe devote 1/3 to 1/2 of the capacity to FAT32 and the rest to NTFS (which is mandatory to store any file larger than 4GB- like video files). --Thanks! Steve Ahola P.S. Here's a link about low level formatting, etc. that someone emailed me: http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks/

11/14/2005 12:05 PM

Steve A.

Preparing hard drive for external case

    I picked up an USB2.0 external hard drive enclosure and tried putting in a 200GB Maxtor slave drive from an ex-computer of mine- but I get messages that indicate it is still looking for the Maxtor software that was installed on the master drive. I believe that I did run fdisk /mbr and then ran the Maxtor partitioning software.

    Any tips on doing this right would be appreciated! The manual for the enclosure is a bit sketchy and leaves out the information that would be specific to each hard drive manufacturer.

    Perhaps the problem was that I did not unplug all of the other hard drives when I ran the Maxtor software, so if the needed drivers were on the master disk it did not bother copying them to the slave disk???

    My other questions have to do with getting the full capacity out of a 200GB hard drive, and making it compatible with all computers. I guess I would proceed with the hard drive plugged in by itself and then set it up as though it would be a permanent not a removeable drive.

    I was thinking of making the first partition FAT32 so that my older computers would recognize it. Maybe devote 1/3 to 1/2 of the capacity to FAT32 and the rest to NTFS (which is mandatory to store any file larger than 4GB- like video files).

--Thanks!

Steve Ahola

P.S. Here's a link about low level formatting, etc. that someone emailed me:

http://www.ameriwebs.net/groupworks/

11/15/2005 11:50 AM
MBSetzer	I use Partition Magic 7, its the best. I like to set it up in a way that would be descended from before they had MSDOS 1.0, that's old. HDD controllers can be nastier and less compatible than ever, so now I always SET UP an IDE drive (especially anything over 137GB) as a master and by itself on the IDE cable. Once its partitioned and everything then you can add another fully set up HDD (previously prepared similarly for stand-alone service) or CDROM to the slave position on the IDE cable. Changing the jumpers accordingly of course. the objective is to get a virgin HDD to be recognized in the native geometry intended by its manufacturer AT THE TIME THE HDD WAS RELEASED, then after partitioning and formatting you have the best chance of it's volumes being compatible with older or newer MB's later. Also, with some modern MB HDD controllers they do not like it when you power down the computer and change to a different HDD on an IDE cable, when you power up again they can become confused and treat the new HDD according to the previous geometry. Old MB's didn't do this because a PC is supposed to be HDD independent and so is the OS, but this is too much in the consumers' advantage so its finally changing. So powering down is no longer enough, you need to disable in bios the entire Primary or Secondary IDE channel in question before restarting, powering down, then removing the present HDD, adding the new one, powering up with its IDE channel still disabled, then restarting to bios to enable its IDE channel before the drive might be recognized properly. Even then I have one where you need to rearrange the boot order in addition to this so you can get a total purge of the battery-backed-up HDD ID info to insure a fresh read from a new HDD. In the '90's it was better because each HDD was completely initialized on each power up without this type of info held in place by the MB battery between restarts. This seems to work pretty good on USB drives, that way you only expect the external enclosure's circuitry to recognize a previously prepared HDD that was working natively fine when it was a lone master on the mainboard. In ideal situations then, if the HDD had an active bootable partition on it, if the MB bios is set to enable USB the right way, and if the OS in the bootable partition has the proper USB drivers, you might just be able to boot to the external HDD. Or it might need some mucking with, or you might have to reinstall Windows, or it might work on Win98 but not Wxp. you might not want to boot to the external HDD anyway, but it can still be a good idea to use the mainboard to initially set up the virgin HDD in case you do need that MB to be able to read the HDD later. or god forbid a completely different mainboard where you might become really glad you initially set up the HDD when it was controlled by MB chipsets like Intel or something rather than what they have in the external enclosure. OTOH, sometimes you might only be able to get it to boot if you did set it up first when the virgin HDD was in the USB box, as long as the MB bios supports USB by itself and you can boot to a WIN98 DOS floppy and access the USB HDD using Partition Magic 7, you should be able to SYS the active partiton after it is formatted and then it will boot to the C: prompt by itself without the floppy after that. This is wonderful since DOS itself was never intended to be compatible with USB, the MB bios many times includes preliminary recognition of external HDDs which DOS can then see within its limitations when it is booted to. Provided also you can select the external HDD or the USB as boot devices in the MB bios, and arrange the boot order to have the external HDD at the top of the hierarchy. In addition to SYSing the partition, you would then need to do a DOS-install of a CDROM driver so you can see your windows CD, you know the drill with MSCDEX.EXE and editing the config.sys & autoexec.bat files to contain some generic driver like the OAKCDROM.SYS they use on the full W98 startup floppy. I don't know if OAKCROM.sys can read the 4.7G contained on a data DVD, but I do know that the Mitsumi version 1.58 sys file (MTMCDAI.sys?) will do it, maybe older versions as well. It doesn't matter if DOS is too old for it to be intended to read DVD's, at least it works. You just want your C: drive to load MSCDEX properly and the sys file like it does when you boot from the floppy and you will be able to see the CDROM when you boot to the DOS on c:. then at the C: prompt install the windows of your choice and it should still boot to the external HDD. There are gotchas like you may need to slipstream SP2 into Wxp before installation or make sure you have USB2 drivers in the proper folders before first trying to restart and boot to windows on the USB HDD for the first restart. Alternatively, or additionally you can install essential drivers for the external USB box when you are still in the blue screen preinstall environment when it says to push one of the F keys to install SCSI drivers, this is where you add needed USB files preferably from a floppy. I did mention that one of the most powerful ways to run Wxp is by installing it in a FAT32 partition? Besides being able to see and repair the XP system files whenever booted to a different OS on a different partition for instance DOS or W98, you can also use W98 to copy your installed XP OS to a blank bootable partition and it will be bootable too, unlike if you were copying the equivalent installation between NTFS partitions. When booted to Wxp running in a FAT32 volume you probably have all the system functions you need or want, it is almost transparently identical to installing onto an NTFS volume. You will still be able to read & write to other NTFS volumes with all of their enhanced features like XP always does, and system restore is the same but for master backups you need to back C: up to another FAT32 partition of course. Anyway back to DOS 1.0, it was not the most popular OS, there were so many others to choose from at the time. You were expected to have different OS's bootable from different partitions whenever you wanted to, kind of like lots of Linux people prefer now. Naturally with its HDD independence the PC was inherently intended to boot to any exact address on any HDD, within restrictions. Serious restrictions like you had to have the HDD controller accessing the HDD using some known or repeatable geometry, under which the partitions had been created. Then you had to have formatted one of the partitions (that makes it become a volume) to be not only recognized by the OS in question, but additionally be labeled on the HDD as an active partition, plus naturally it had to have an OS installed on that formatted volume properly. The MB will then boot control from its bios to the first active partition within the HDD hierarchy, and expect an operational OS to be present in a volume beginning at that point. And then you could only boot to a PRIMARY partition (not a logical volume in an EXTENDED partition) and only if its track zero started toward the beginning of the HDD geometry, within the range of the DOS versions' ability to directly access that HDD address absolutely before making subsequent accesses relative to that point for the remainder of that OS session. What this means with W9x is that each partition that you want to have the option of booting to, now or later, has to begin before the 8.4gig physical barrier on the HDD. So a 200gig HDD can be handled very similarly to how you would have handled a 20MB HDD when DOS was only capable of accessing 4megs per volume maximum. You partition the oversized HDD into a number of volumes, each of which is small enough for the OS to fully address. With unpatched W98 its 64G max per volume, W95 only addresses 32G max so I usually use 30 gig or so per volume for file storage volumes. Plus W9x only will ever natively recognize a volume if it begins before the 137G physical barrier. Also not to forget that the original PC's were intended to have only 4 primary partitions so that leads me to two major logical ways I set up HDD's these days. For a smaller HDD like 40G, I make only 4 partitions on the whole HDD and all of them start before 8.0G and all are potentially bootable. For instance: 1) 3gig primary fat32 2) 2gig primary fat32 3) 3gig primary fat32 -note only 8.0gig of the HDD has been allocated at this point. 4) 32gig primary fat32 -well 32G or the remainder of the HDD, as long as its less than 32G in this final volume, W95 will see it all and since this final primary volume begins before the 8.4gig barrier, it will be able to be made active and booted to when you want to. After creating the formatted partitions with PM7, when you make one of them active it automatically hides the other 3 potentially bootable primary partitions. Since DOS has claimed to have never supported having more than one visible primary per HDD under threat of data loss this is following the (very old) rules. But you can still boot to each blank partition in turn when it is active while the other 3 are hidden and install windows on it, then have a different version of windows or another OS like Linux on a different partition, of course with Linux you would need to have formatted the partition for Linux rather than for the fat32 of windows. Anyway, 2 or 3gig volumes may be just fine for W98 but they are not very adequate in size for Wxp. So you install Xp in the final volume and have W98 installed in the first, second, and/or third partition, maybe just as a rescue volume. Now using PM7 if you were to boot to each of partitions 1, 2, 3, & 4 in turn by making the desired partition active while the others were respectively hidden, this will slightly change each volume's boot record and usually allow you to make more than one of the primary partitions visible without losing data in W9x. Without this preventaive measure the system will more often find a phantom volume and list it on your Windows Explorer but it will not be accessible. A 40gig HDD like this may not show a phantom volume on its own, sometimes only when it is also aware of a larger HDD on a different IDE position which has hidden or non-FAT volumes. So IME that's the risk of data loss, if you format the phantom volume (like windows sometimes asks you to) it could overwrite something valuable, or if windows goes into automatic scandisk upon a faulty restart it can screw it up by itself if you are not babysitting to exit scandisk before it gets beyond C: and starts heading for the phantom drive's letter. Ultimate precaution is to check for phantom volumes when more than one primary partition on the same HDD is visible, and if so only allow them to remain visible when you are babysitting the machine, like for recovery purposes or the occasional transfer of files or systems to or from the alternate boot volumes. Most of the time you would keep them hidden anyway, except on laptops where you can usually have all visible without problems since there is only one HDD and they are usually still smaller than 137GB, this is like the laptop equivalent of having two extra HDD's for a total of 3 in a desktop when you want a different OS on each HDD while each HDD only has a single volume on it filling the whole HDD. This type of desktop only needs to have the desired boot HDD selected in bios to choose which OS you boot to. With the multi-primary laptop you need PM7 to choose the desired primary partition to make active and its the one that will boot. Anyway again, a 200G HDD stll gets only 4 primary partitions by the old rules, and can also be handled as intended for DOS of the '80's. This time you use extended partitions and don't expect a bootable volume to extend to the end of the HDD. 1) 5G primary Fat32 2) 3G primary fat32 -note 8.0gig allocatd at this point 3) 30G primary fat32 - this one will be bootable but no further partitions will generally be bootable from DOS 4) 160Gig extended partition - the remainder of the HDD. This is considered a primary partition but it only will contain logical storage volumes, the first ones occurring below 137GB might as well be fat32 since you will have plenty of NTFS's beyond that point as well as on all of these big HDD's in the future at addresses above 137G. Now within the 160G extended partition, you make little 30G fat32 volumes until one ends at almost the 137G point relative to the beginning of the HDD, then from that point you make your NTFS volumes in the same extended partition until you come to the end of the HDD. Keep in mind that Wxp without any service packs will not be able to see above 137G either. All of these 30G fat32 volumes on the 200G HDD will be operational in W95b or better. Of course in all these schemes you NEED to label your partitions using PM7 not microsoft, so you always know which partition you are dealing with since the drive LETTERS are supposed to be reassigned (using an arcane hierarchy) each time you boot just in case it was a time that you added a new HDD or CDROM or have hidden or unhidden an established volume(s) whether temporary or not. This potentially unexpected rearrangement of volume letters could very well have been the only source of data loss that was risked when DOS was first declared to not support more than one visible primary to begin with. it sure seems to have discouraged the use of multiple OS's on the same HDD (using simple MBR editing as originally intended on the IBM PC, rather than a boot loader) beginning at the time when microsoft could have been expected to have benefitted most. On this HDD the 5G primary (partition 1) can have Wxp installed on its FAT32 volume, then install W98SE on the 3G volume (partition 2). Then boot to partition 2 and xxcopy from partition 1 to partition 3 and make 3 active and it should boot. Might need to have already had partition 3 bootable in DOS before copying the Wxp OS files from partition 1. or do a slight XP repair to partition 3 but eventually you can just use PM7 when booted to a floppy and choose which of the first 3 partitions to boot to whenever you want to change OS or for instance fully recover your XP OS from the backup partition as quickly as it takes you to copy less than 5G of uncompressed files from one volume to the other verbatim. And of course XP will be able to see any unhidden partition on the HDD while W98 will only see unhidden fat32's. and this just scratches the surface . . . Mike

11/15/2005 11:50 AM

MBSetzer

I use Partition Magic 7, its the best.

I like to set it up in a way that would be descended from before they had MSDOS 1.0, that's old.

HDD controllers can be nastier and less compatible than ever, so now I always SET UP an IDE drive (especially anything over 137GB) as a master and by itself on the IDE cable. Once its partitioned and everything then you can add another fully set up HDD (previously prepared similarly for stand-alone service) or CDROM to the slave position on the IDE cable. Changing the jumpers accordingly of course.

the objective is to get a virgin HDD to be recognized in the native geometry intended by its manufacturer AT THE TIME THE HDD WAS RELEASED, then after partitioning and formatting you have the best chance of it's volumes being compatible with older or newer MB's later.

Also, with some modern MB HDD controllers they do not like it when you power down the computer and change to a different HDD on an IDE cable, when you power up again they can become confused and treat the new HDD according to the previous geometry. Old MB's didn't do this because a PC is supposed to be HDD independent and so is the OS, but this is too much in the consumers' advantage so its finally changing. So powering down is no longer enough, you need to disable in bios the entire Primary or Secondary IDE channel in question before restarting, powering down, then removing the present HDD, adding the new one, powering up with its IDE channel still disabled, then restarting to bios to enable its IDE channel before the drive might be recognized properly. Even then I have one where you need to rearrange the boot order in addition to this so you can get a total purge of the battery-backed-up HDD ID info to insure a fresh read from a new HDD. In the '90's it was better because each HDD was completely initialized on each power up without this type of info held in place by the MB battery between restarts.

This seems to work pretty good on USB drives, that way you only expect the external enclosure's circuitry to recognize a previously prepared HDD that was working natively fine when it was a lone master on the mainboard.

In ideal situations then, if the HDD had an active bootable partition on it, if the MB bios is set to enable USB the right way, and if the OS in the bootable partition has the proper USB drivers, you might just be able to boot to the external HDD.
Or it might need some mucking with, or you might have to reinstall Windows, or it might work on Win98 but not Wxp.
you might not want to boot to the external HDD anyway, but it can still be a good idea to use the mainboard to initially set up the virgin HDD in case you do need that MB to be able to read the HDD later. or god forbid a completely different mainboard where you might become really glad you initially set up the HDD when it was controlled by MB chipsets like Intel or something rather than what they have in the external enclosure.

OTOH, sometimes you might only be able to get it to boot if you did set it up first when the virgin HDD was in the USB box, as long as the MB bios supports USB by itself and you can boot to a WIN98 DOS floppy and access the USB HDD using Partition Magic 7, you should be able to SYS the active partiton after it is formatted and then it will boot to the C: prompt by itself without the floppy after that. This is wonderful since DOS itself was never intended to be compatible with USB, the MB bios many times includes preliminary recognition of external HDDs which DOS can then see within its limitations when it is booted to. Provided also you can select the external HDD or the USB as boot devices in the MB bios, and arrange the boot order to have the external HDD at the top of the hierarchy.
In addition to SYSing the partition, you would then need to do a DOS-install of a CDROM driver so you can see your windows CD, you know the drill with MSCDEX.EXE and editing the config.sys & autoexec.bat files to contain some generic driver like the OAKCDROM.SYS they use on the full W98 startup floppy. I don't know if OAKCROM.sys can read the 4.7G contained on a data DVD, but I do know that the Mitsumi version 1.58 sys file (MTMCDAI.sys?) will do it, maybe older versions as well. It doesn't matter if DOS is too old for it to be intended to read DVD's, at least it works. You just want your C: drive to load MSCDEX properly and the sys file like it does when you boot from the floppy and you will be able to see the CDROM when you boot to the DOS on c:.

then at the C: prompt install the windows of your choice and it should still boot to the external HDD. There are gotchas like you may need to slipstream SP2 into Wxp before installation or make sure you have USB2 drivers in the proper folders before first trying to restart and boot to windows on the USB HDD for the first restart. Alternatively, or additionally you can install essential drivers for the external USB box when you are still in the blue screen preinstall environment when it says to push one of the *F* keys to install SCSI drivers, this is where you add needed USB files preferably from a floppy.

I did mention that one of the most powerful ways to run Wxp is by installing it in a FAT32 partition?
Besides being able to see and repair the XP system files whenever booted to a different OS on a different partition for instance DOS or W98, you can also use W98 to copy your installed XP OS to a blank bootable partition and it will be bootable too, unlike if you were copying the equivalent installation between NTFS partitions.
When booted to Wxp running in a FAT32 volume you probably have all the system functions you need or want, it is almost transparently identical to installing onto an NTFS volume. You will still be able to read & write to other NTFS volumes with all of their enhanced features like XP always does, and system restore is the same but for master backups you need to back C: up to another FAT32 partition of course.

Anyway back to DOS 1.0, it was not the most popular OS, there were so many others to choose from at the time. You were expected to have different OS's bootable from different partitions whenever you wanted to, kind of like lots of Linux people prefer now. Naturally with its HDD independence the PC was inherently intended to boot to any exact address on any HDD, within restrictions. Serious restrictions like you had to have the HDD controller accessing the HDD using some known or repeatable geometry, under which the partitions had been created. Then you had to have formatted one of the partitions (that makes it become a *volume*) to be not only recognized by the OS in question, but additionally be labeled on the HDD as an active partition, plus naturally it had to have an OS installed on that formatted volume properly. The MB will then boot control from its bios to the first active partition within the HDD hierarchy, and expect an operational OS to be present in a volume beginning at that point.
And then you could only boot to a PRIMARY partition (not a logical volume in an EXTENDED partition) and only if its track zero started toward the beginning of the HDD geometry, within the range of the DOS versions' ability to directly access that HDD address absolutely before making subsequent accesses relative to that point for the remainder of that OS session.

What this means with W9x is that each partition that you want to have the option of booting to, now or later, has to begin before the 8.4gig physical barrier on the HDD.

So a 200gig HDD can be handled very similarly to how you would have handled a 20MB HDD when DOS was only capable of accessing 4megs per volume maximum. You partition the oversized HDD into a number of volumes, each of which is small enough for the OS to fully address.
With unpatched W98 its 64G max per volume, W95 only addresses 32G max so I usually use 30 gig or so per volume for file storage volumes.
Plus W9x only will ever natively recognize a volume if it begins before the 137G physical barrier.
Also not to forget that the original PC's were intended to have only 4 primary partitions so that leads me to two major logical ways I set up HDD's these days.

For a smaller HDD like 40G, I make only 4 partitions on the whole HDD and all of them start before 8.0G and all are potentially bootable.
For instance:
1) 3gig primary fat32
2) 2gig primary fat32
3) 3gig primary fat32 -note only 8.0gig of the HDD has been allocated at this point.
4) 32gig primary fat32 -well 32G or the remainder of the HDD, as long as its less than 32G in this final volume, W95 will see it all and since this final primary volume begins before the 8.4gig barrier, it will be able to be made active and booted to when you want to.

After creating the formatted partitions with PM7, when you make one of them active it automatically hides the other 3 potentially bootable primary partitions. Since DOS has claimed to have never supported having more than one visible primary per HDD under threat of *data loss* this is following the (very old) rules. But you can still boot to each blank partition in turn when it is active while the other 3 are hidden and install windows on it, then have a different version of windows or another OS like Linux on a different partition, of course with Linux you would need to have formatted the partition for Linux rather than for the fat32 of windows.

Anyway, 2 or 3gig volumes may be just fine for W98 but they are not very adequate in size for Wxp. So you install Xp in the final volume and have W98 installed in the first, second, and/or third partition, maybe just as a rescue volume.
Now using PM7 if you were to boot to each of partitions 1, 2, 3, & 4 in turn by making the desired partition active while the others were respectively hidden, this will slightly change each volume's boot record and usually allow you to make more than one of the primary partitions visible without losing data in W9x. Without this preventaive measure the system will more often find a *phantom volume* and list it on your Windows Explorer but it will not be accessible. A 40gig HDD like this may not show a phantom volume on its own, sometimes only when it is also aware of a larger HDD on a different IDE position which has hidden or non-FAT volumes.
So IME that's the risk of data loss, if you format the phantom volume (like windows sometimes asks you to) it could overwrite something valuable, or if windows goes into automatic scandisk upon a faulty restart it can screw it up by itself if you are not babysitting to exit scandisk before it gets beyond C: and starts heading for the phantom drive's letter.
Ultimate precaution is to check for phantom volumes when more than one primary partition on the same HDD is visible, and if so only allow them to remain visible when you are babysitting the machine, like for recovery purposes or the occasional transfer of files or systems to or from the alternate boot volumes. Most of the time you would keep them hidden anyway, except on laptops where you can usually have all visible without problems since there is only one HDD and they are usually still smaller than 137GB, this is like the laptop equivalent of having two extra HDD's for a total of 3 in a desktop when you want a different OS on each HDD while each HDD only has a single volume on it filling the whole HDD. This type of desktop only needs to have the desired boot HDD selected in bios to choose which OS you boot to. With the multi-primary laptop you need PM7 to choose the desired primary partition to make active and its the one that will boot.

Anyway again, a 200G HDD stll gets only 4 primary partitions by the old rules, and can also be handled as intended for DOS of the '80's. This time you use extended partitions and don't expect a bootable volume to extend to the end of the HDD.

1) 5G primary Fat32
2) 3G primary fat32 -note 8.0gig allocatd at this point
3) 30G primary fat32 - this one will be bootable but no further partitions will generally be bootable from DOS
4) 160Gig extended partition - the remainder of the HDD. This is considered a primary partition but it only will contain logical storage volumes, the first ones occurring below 137GB might as well be fat32 since you will have plenty of NTFS's beyond that point as well as on all of these big HDD's in the future at addresses above 137G.

Now within the 160G extended partition, you make little 30G fat32 volumes until one ends at almost the 137G point relative to the beginning of the HDD, then from that point you make your NTFS volumes in the same extended partition until you come to the end of the HDD. Keep in mind that Wxp without any service packs will not be able to see above 137G either.
All of these 30G fat32 volumes on the 200G HDD will be operational in W95b or better.
Of course in all these schemes you NEED to label your partitions using PM7 not microsoft, so you always know which partition you are dealing with since the drive LETTERS are supposed to be reassigned (using an arcane hierarchy) each time you boot just in case it was a time that you added a new HDD or CDROM or have hidden or unhidden an established volume(s) whether temporary or not. This potentially unexpected rearrangement of volume letters could very well have been the only source of data loss that was risked when DOS was first declared to not support more than one visible primary to begin with. it sure seems to have discouraged the use of multiple OS's on the same HDD (using simple MBR editing as originally intended on the IBM PC, rather than a boot loader) beginning at the time when microsoft could have been expected to have benefitted most.

On this HDD the 5G primary (partition 1) can have Wxp installed on its FAT32 volume, then install W98SE on the 3G volume (partition 2). Then boot to partition 2 and xxcopy from partition 1 to partition 3 and make 3 active and it should boot. Might need to have already had partition 3 bootable in DOS before copying the Wxp OS files from partition 1. or do a slight XP repair to partition 3 but eventually you can just use PM7 when booted to a floppy and choose which of the first 3 partitions to boot to whenever you want to change OS or for instance fully recover your XP OS from the backup partition as quickly as it takes you to copy less than 5G of uncompressed files from one volume to the other verbatim.

And of course XP will be able to see any unhidden partition on the HDD while W98 will only see unhidden fat32's.

and this just scratches the surface . . .

Mike

11/15/2005 12:30 PM
MBSetzer	ps - if your drive is not a virgin, she can be renewed by first removing all cables and letting the internal capacitors discharge fully for about an hour or so. Also let the computer be disconnected from the wall outlet. good idea to also disable the IDE controller as listed in my previous message before removing the previous HDD and replacing it with the maxtor. Then if its the maxtor, hook it up to an IDE master by itself on the MB cable, and fire the PC up once without enabling the IDE channel just to get the HDD accustomed to power but not experienced at sending its ID string to a controller yet. then power up to boot to floppy but put in a blank floppy so the boot process halts before accessing the HDD. then enable the IDE channel and repower. make sure from the bios messages (no quiet boot) that the HDD is identified properly, and maybe check in bios itself to see if the CHS geometry (which is no longer supposed to be in use these days) has been automatically picked up to be identical to that with the exact HDD model's documentation. then put in the bootable maxtor diagnostic floppy of the same vintage as the HDD and boot to it. then when you write zeros to the whole HDD it will have less possibility of using a previous incorrect or less-automatically-detected geometry for the zeroing process. Most modern HDDs will rezero with incorrect or custom (nonautomatic) geometry if you let them if that's whats already there (such as after having been partitioned using a foreign controller), which can make them almost impossible to restore to factory zeroness once you do get them recognized the natively correct way automatically. With drives over 137GB you might also need to lower the transfer mode to less than the full DMA or UDMA capability of the HDD before zeroing, depending on the controller chipset or bios revision. This is sometimes also a necessary step when adding a second HDDD or CDROM to its IDE cable, sometimes the master and slave HDD needs to be rolled back to DMA2 from faster settings before it will share the cable with other hardware. Mike

11/15/2005 12:30 PM

MBSetzer

ps - if your drive is not a virgin, she can be renewed by first removing all cables and letting the internal capacitors discharge fully for about an hour or so. Also let the computer be disconnected from the wall outlet.

good idea to also disable the IDE controller as listed in my previous message before removing the previous HDD and replacing it with the maxtor.

Then if its the maxtor, hook it up to an IDE master by itself on the MB cable, and fire the PC up once without enabling the IDE channel just to get the HDD accustomed to power but not experienced at sending its ID string to a controller yet.
then power up to boot to floppy but put in a blank floppy so the boot process halts before accessing the HDD. then enable the IDE channel and repower.

make sure from the bios messages (no *quiet boot*) that the HDD is identified properly, and maybe check in bios itself to see if the CHS geometry (which is no longer supposed to be in use these days) has been automatically picked up to be identical to that with the exact HDD model's documentation.

then put in the bootable maxtor diagnostic floppy of the same vintage as the HDD and boot to it.

then when you write zeros to the whole HDD it will have less possibility of using a previous incorrect or less-automatically-detected geometry for the zeroing process. Most modern HDDs will rezero with incorrect or *custom* (nonautomatic) geometry if you let them if that's whats already there (such as after having been partitioned using a *foreign* controller), which can make them almost impossible to restore to factory zeroness once you do get them recognized the natively correct way automatically.

With drives over 137GB you might also need to lower the transfer mode to less than the full DMA or UDMA capability of the HDD before zeroing, depending on the controller chipset or bios revision. This is sometimes also a necessary step when adding a second HDDD or CDROM to its IDE cable, sometimes the master and slave HDD needs to be rolled back to DMA2 from faster settings before it will share the cable with other hardware.

Mike

11/15/2005 10:03 PM
Steve A.	Mike: For just running the DOS software to set up my 200GB drive, would I need to connect it to one of my newer motherboards, with a BIOS that recognizes a large drive (especially one > 137GB) or can I just hook it up to old mobo that I have in my garage (pre millenium, I believe). Otherwise I guess I can just disconnect my hd's on one of my newer computers. Steve Ahola

11/16/2005 12:25 PM
MBSetzer	If you can you really do want to first expose the HDD to a controller which was designed to handle over 137gb. Second choice would be a MB that was originally issued handling less than 137G, but had its bios updated to work over 137G. So use about the newest MB you have to set up the HDD. After that if things go well, you should even be able to move the HDD to a MB that does not go above 137G, and at least see the partitions below that point. But don't let such a MB make changes to the HDD. This may be difficult to avoid unless you have on-board MB virus detection enabled which gives you a message from bios whenever something is about to change your MBR. Like installing windows. One of the worthwhile HDD backup elements is on the Western Digital bootable CDROM that comes with their new HDD's larger than 137G. Data Lifeguard Tools is what they still call it but IIRC you need to boot to the CD then make a floppy, then boot to the floppy and use a utility to backup the master boot record. This would be the same utility you can download from the WD site, except IME the downloaded version only works on WD HDD's but the CD included with a purchase works on other HDD's besides WD. If you do plan to remove a 200G HDD from a current MB and put it in a <137G MB, it would really be a good idea to back up the master boot record on the more capable MB beforehand, so in case it gets edited by the weaker machine you could restore from the backup to recover your higher partitions. I have also been using Ranish 2.44 to view and record the detailed track information after a virgin HDD is first set up. This utility is downloaded, added to a bootable floppy, then boot to DOS on the floppy, run part.exe and you are in Ranish. But once in Ranish, you can select a menu item that will write an additional floppy that will be bootable by itself without DOS, just goes straight to Ranish. That's the floppy I boot to after that. Basically this track info is contained in the HDD but if it gets hosed you can manually reenter and recover partitions as long as they have not been overwritten. I do not use ranish to hide or unhide partitions since that part of it seems to be in conflict with how PM7 hides & unhides. So I always use PM7 to hide & unhide. Mainly just use Ranish to view whether the MBR is standard or unknown, and reset it to standard after a change. that way once you get all your bootable primary partitions with OS's on them, and everything is working OK, you set the MBR to standard and it will then revert to unknown only after a significant change like ingesting an MBR virus. I suggest as much experimentation as you can handle with PM7 before putting valuable data on the HDD. A good exersize is to just play around with W98SE after doing a quick slim install of less than 200MB worth of OS files. then you can xxcopy this bootable volume between partitions and make sure they still boot, etc. before moving up to bootable XP volumes with the extra time & effort involved installing, copying and replacing the much greater disk space needed for XP. Once accustomed to xxcopy of both W98 and XP in between bootable fat32 partitions, then do the analogous method of using GHOST 2003 (not a newer version, and do not mark drives for use by ghost) for creating uncompressed backup images for transfer of bootable volumes to other partitions for NTFS installations. and that's after using just basic W98 DOS to SYS volumes on the external HDD just to make sure it can boot before moving on to the full W98. Mike

11/16/2005 12:25 PM

MBSetzer

If you can you really do want to first expose the HDD to a controller which was designed to handle over 137gb.

Second choice would be a MB that was originally issued handling less than 137G, but had its bios updated to work over 137G.

So use about the newest MB you have to set up the HDD. After that if things go well, you should even be able to move the HDD to a MB that does not go above 137G, and at least see the partitions below that point. But don't let such a MB make changes to the HDD. This may be difficult to avoid unless you have on-board MB virus detection enabled which gives you a message from bios whenever something is about to change your MBR. Like installing windows.

One of the worthwhile HDD backup elements is on the Western Digital bootable CDROM that comes with their new HDD's larger than 137G. Data Lifeguard Tools is what they still call it but IIRC you need to boot to the CD then make a floppy, then boot to the floppy and use a utility to backup the master boot record.

This would be the same utility you can download from the WD site, except IME the downloaded version only works on WD HDD's but the CD included with a purchase works on other HDD's besides WD.

If you do plan to remove a 200G HDD from a current MB and put it in a <137G MB, it would really be a good idea to back up the master boot record on the more capable MB beforehand, so in case it gets edited by the weaker machine you could restore from the backup to recover your higher partitions.

I have also been using Ranish 2.44 to view and record the detailed track information after a virgin HDD is first set up. This utility is downloaded, added to a bootable floppy, then boot to DOS on the floppy, run part.exe and you are in Ranish. But once in Ranish, you can select a menu item that will write an additional floppy that will be bootable by itself without DOS, just goes straight to Ranish. That's the floppy I boot to after that.
Basically this track info is contained in the HDD but if it gets hosed you can manually reenter and recover partitions as long as they have not been overwritten.

I do not use ranish to hide or unhide partitions since that part of it seems to be in conflict with how PM7 hides & unhides. So I always use PM7 to hide & unhide. Mainly just use Ranish to view whether the MBR is *standard* or *unknown*, and reset it to standard after a change. that way once you get all your bootable primary partitions with OS's on them, and everything is working OK, you set the MBR to standard and it will then revert to unknown only after a significant change like ingesting an MBR virus.

I suggest as much experimentation as you can handle with PM7 before putting valuable data on the HDD. A good exersize is to just play around with W98SE after doing a quick slim install of less than 200MB worth of OS files. then you can xxcopy this bootable volume between partitions and make sure they still boot, etc. before moving up to bootable XP volumes with the extra time & effort involved installing, copying and replacing the much greater disk space needed for XP.

Once accustomed to xxcopy of both W98 and XP in between bootable fat32 partitions, then do the analogous method of using GHOST 2003 (not a newer version, and do not *mark drives for use by ghost*) for creating uncompressed backup images for transfer of bootable volumes to other partitions for NTFS installations.

and that's after using just basic W98 DOS to SYS volumes on the external HDD just to make sure it can boot before moving on to the full W98.

Mike

11/20/2005 12:14 PM
bob p	just because you have a new, big hard disk that may exceed the expectations of your machine's bios doesn't mean that you can't boot from it. there are a number of ways to attack this problem, and some of them involve "tricking" your PC's BIOS. in the big scheme of things, you computer's BIOS compatability doesn't have to be a factor in the equation. there are a number of ways to work around it. i have an old 486 PC that boots off of a 200 GB drive, even though the BIOS won't recognize it. ultimately, whether or not your drive is recognizable by your computer depends upon drive support being built into your kernel, not your BIOS. this explains, for example, why you can boot XP and recognize an IDE drive that is turned off in the system's BIOS tables. XP only uses the BIOS to load the boot device, and once the kernel takes control, it re-polls all of the devices and will even recognize devices that the BIOS doesn't report as being present. for example, i have an old PC with a crappy IDE interface that also has a high performance SCSI system in it. if i were to hook-up an IDE drive, the system would preferentially boot off of the IDE device and not the SCSI device. so i have the IDE channel turned off in BIOS. this forces the system to boot from the SCSI device as "C" when booting XP, and when XP re-polls the device interfaces, it finds the IDE drive and mounts it as drive "E". Win98 won't do the same thing -- it doesn't re-poll the devices and it never finds the IDE device if BIOS is turned off. so alot of this behavior depends upon your kernel. in Linux, for example, you can partition a huge giga-drive so that a small 100 MB partition sits up front, and the remainder of the drive is used as a second partition. then your PC's BIOS only has to recognize a 100 MB disk to boot the system. after that, the kernel takes over and recognizes the remainder of the huge hard disk even though the BIOS couldn't recognize it. these are examples of how to deal with the problem at the kernel level. (XP can do this too.) there's another trick that you may want to look into that is not documented in the technical papers that come with your drive -- its called "clipping" the drives. it involves using those extra jumper pins on the hard drive jumpers (the ones that you never use otherwise) to force the drive to lie to the BIOS about its characteristics at bootup. clipping tells the drive to report its size as if it were a smaller drive than it actually is, so that older BIOS can deal with it. then, once you have a kernel loaded that can address the drive, the kernel addresses the drive's real capacity. although information on clipping a drive isn't included in the documentation that comes with WD and Maxtor drives, the information is available if you search for jumper settings on the website. in your case, i don't know if added translation through a USB interface adds a layer of complexity that makes your problem harder to solve. i don't know about dealing with this kind of thing in XP, but in linux there are specfic kernel modules that have to be enabled to recognize USB devices such as keyboards, mice, and drives at bootup. with linux you have granularity over controlling each of these items at bootup. in contrast, you don't have any granular control with an OS like XP, so i don't know if there's a solution to your problem. hth

11/20/2005 12:14 PM

bob p

just because you have a new, big hard disk that may exceed the expectations of your machine's bios doesn't mean that you can't boot from it. there are a number of ways to attack this problem, and some of them involve "tricking" your PC's BIOS.

in the big scheme of things, you computer's BIOS compatability doesn't have to be a factor in the equation. there are a number of ways to work around it. i have an old 486 PC that boots off of a 200 GB drive, even though the BIOS won't recognize it.

ultimately, whether or not your drive is recognizable by your computer depends upon drive support being built into your kernel, not your BIOS.

this explains, for example, why you can boot XP and recognize an IDE drive that is turned off in the system's BIOS tables. XP only uses the BIOS to load the boot device, and once the kernel takes control, it re-polls all of the devices and will even recognize devices that the BIOS doesn't report as being present.

for example, i have an old PC with a crappy IDE interface that also has a high performance SCSI system in it. if i were to hook-up an IDE drive, the system would preferentially boot off of the IDE device and not the SCSI device. so i have the IDE channel turned off in BIOS. this forces the system to boot from the SCSI device as "C" when booting XP, and when XP re-polls the device interfaces, it finds the IDE drive and mounts it as drive "E". Win98 won't do the same thing -- it doesn't re-poll the devices and it never finds the IDE device if BIOS is turned off. so alot of this behavior depends upon your kernel.

in Linux, for example, you can partition a huge giga-drive so that a small 100 MB partition sits up front, and the remainder of the drive is used as a second partition. then your PC's BIOS only has to recognize a 100 MB disk to boot the system. after that, the kernel takes over and recognizes the remainder of the huge hard disk even though the BIOS couldn't recognize it. these are examples of how to deal with the problem at the kernel level. (XP can do this too.)

there's another trick that you may want to look into that is not documented in the technical papers that come with your drive -- its called "clipping" the drives. it involves using those extra jumper pins on the hard drive jumpers (the ones that you never use otherwise) to force the drive to lie to the BIOS about its characteristics at bootup. clipping tells the drive to report its size as if it were a smaller drive than it actually is, so that older BIOS can deal with it. then, once you have a kernel loaded that can address the drive, the kernel addresses the drive's real capacity.

although information on clipping a drive isn't included in the documentation that comes with WD and Maxtor drives, the information is available if you search for jumper settings on the website.

in your case, i don't know if added translation through a USB interface adds a layer of complexity that makes your problem harder to solve. i don't know about dealing with this kind of thing in XP, but in linux there are specfic kernel modules that have to be enabled to recognize USB devices such as keyboards, mice, and drives at bootup. with linux you have granularity over controlling each of these items at bootup. in contrast, you don't have any granular control with an OS like XP, so i don't know if there's a solution to your problem.

hth

11/20/2005 12:41 PM
Steve A.	Update I figured that I might as well run the Maxtor Low Level Format program that was in one of the links posted here... it took about 12 hours to format a 160GB hard drive. I would have cancelled the operation but I thought that might screw up my drive. My plans for this external drive are strictly for storage, no booting. My concern was that I could plug it into ANY computer and have it be recognized, at least to some extent. With the 137GB limit in older OS's, I decided to make the first two partitions ~64GB apiece, the first as FAT32 and the second as NTFS. The rest of the drive is formatted at NTSF (necessary to store large video files >4GB). Hmmm... I never realized that the operating system could override the drive limiting jumpers. Steve Ahola P.S. I used my Number One computer to format and partition this drive (plus two other ones). I disconnected the two SATA cables from the mobo and then moved the IDE cable from my Plextor DVD-RW drive to the bare hard drives, one at a time. The three hard drives seem to be okay, but when I reconnected my DVD-RW it doesn't work properly anymore (it doesn't recognize any disk that I insert). Control Panel System Hardware Device Manager says that it is operating properly...

11/20/2005 12:41 PM

Steve A.

Update

I figured that I might as well run the Maxtor Low Level Format program that was in one of the links posted here... it took about 12 hours to format a 160GB hard drive. I would have cancelled the operation but I thought that might screw up my drive.

My plans for this external drive are strictly for storage, no booting. My concern was that I could plug it into ANY computer and have it be recognized, at least to some extent. With the 137GB limit in older OS's, I decided to make the first two partitions ~64GB apiece, the first as FAT32 and the second as NTFS. The rest of the drive is formatted at NTSF (necessary to store large video files >4GB).

Hmmm... I never realized that the operating system could override the drive limiting jumpers.

Steve Ahola

P.S. I used my Number One computer to format and partition this drive (plus two other ones). I disconnected the two SATA cables from the mobo and then moved the IDE cable from my Plextor DVD-RW drive to the bare hard drives, one at a time. The three hard drives seem to be okay, but when I reconnected my DVD-RW it doesn't work properly anymore (it doesn't recognize any disk that I insert). Control Panel System Hardware Device Manager says that it is operating properly...

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