Topic: Hard Drive

[Sandra]

Well guys as its after 6pm the deadline has passed for my previous topic re : RAM ,so you have a few more hours to get back to me on that one but I must exchange it tomorrow if I cant get it to work as a 256K on my FIC board.
In the meantime :
I had another problem last night which happened after swapping various sticks of ram in and out of my PC.My PC decided it would only run in DOS Compatability mode for some reason.After a reboot it wouldnt even go into windows and would only start in SAFE mode ( Win 98SE OS by the way ).I looked at everything I could see and noticed I had acquired a couple more IDE primary and secondary controllers which it wouldnt let me delete  
The only way I could get it to run into windows at all was by doing a selective start up and not allowing CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to load.
Once it was running in a fashion in proper windows I ran Norton Win Doctor and it didnt find any problems other than the usual invalid shortcuts etc.In the Device Manager it now showed 6 IDE controllers primary and secondary which still wouldnt allow me to remove them.
I also have lost the second partition on my D drive  
I reinstalled the VIA 4 in 1 update for the motherboard and it sorted out the extra IDE controllers and all appeared ok except for my Drive E is still AWOL.The second drive seems to have developed a fault somehow as in Fdisk it tells me its a 5gig drive which is only using 67%,its actually a 3.1 gig drive   I decided to wipe it and ran Fdisk to delete and create partitions and format it but it still says its a 5 gig drive.
A friend has taken it home to see if he can sort it out on his PC now.
My query is this,is it just a coincidence that my drive appears to have failed after swapping the ram about or have I developed The Curse of Simon  
Is it normal for drives to be read as 2gig bigger than they actually are?Any ideas  


Do I get a prize for the longest (albeit fullest description possible)serious posts on Pals  

[Adept]

Do I get a prize for the longest (albeit fullest description possible)serious posts on Pals  

No chance Sandra  I think Catch has beaten you by a couple of pages



It is the BIOS that determines the drive size for FDISK to partition. Are you sure that your PCs BIOS has detected the drive correctly?

[Sandra]

The BIOS "sees" it as just over 5 gig for some reason,but I ran this drive for about 18 months in my first PC and it had been wiped and formatted a few times and is/has and will always be a 3.1 gig.It has been installed in this PC and running fine for some 6 months or so as a 3.1gig drive until it developed growing pains last night ( or is it middle age spread   )and became 5 gig  

[Sandra]

Update to my 3.1gig growing to 5 gig drive :
I got an e mail from friend whod taken it to try it in his PC and he has managed to retrieve some stuff off it and has wiped it and repartitioned it.It now says its a 3.1 gig drive but for some reason wont accept being one partition of 3.1gig and will only work as one of 2gig and one of 1.1 gig.Hopefully I will get it back later today and try it back in my PC although I will be very wary of keeping anything important on it from now on  

[Tony]

Do I get a prize for the longest (albeit fullest description possible)serious posts on Pals  

No chance Sandra  I think Catch has beaten you by a couple of pages

true true  

Jeez Sandra your having some bad luck, you might be building up to much static, see my earlier post  

catch

[Sandra]

I never wear nylon ones thes days Catch  
Just silk and natural fibres