Dear All,
I have a problem, I think, and would like advise on it if possible.
I have an IBM Thinkpad 570 running Win98 (SE?) Swedish. My 4 gig hard drive
is partitioned into C: and D:. C is slightly bigger and shows as just above
2 gig whereas D: is around 1.8 gig. C: is FAT16 and D: is FAT32. These are
all IBM defaults. I have never changed any settings for the hard drive.
Recently my computer crashed when I was running Norton Disk Doctor. It was
accessing the boot sector when it died (it was actually Norton Antivirus
that reported NDD.EXE trying to access boot sector, but the computer hang
and I could not allow or reject access). After that I was unable to boot
from the harddrive. I could boot from diskette and retreive my files
though. Then I reformatted C:, and performed a recovery with the IBM rescue
CD-rom. It seems to work fine now. I have recovered the system several
times, not because of crashes but as way of 'cleaning up Windows'.
However, when I start Drive Image 2002 I get an error message that they
claim is very serious:
"Drive Image detected error 110 on the partition starting at sector 63 on
disk 1.
Length of partition in the partition table is incorrect.
The CHS is 4193217, the LBA is 4192902 and the file system length is 4193217.
DI has determined that the length can be changed to the correct value of
4913217.
Would you like DI to fix this error?"
I looked up this error message (#110) in the DI manual and it said that
this problem is very serious since it may cause loss of critical system
data located at the beginning of the disk, when the hard drive fills up and
wrongly 'spans over the edge' and continues writing data at beginning of
the disk while thinking it is writing to the end of the disk. Basically the
system would think the drive is bigger than it is, or something like that.
I should say that before the crash, I got this same message after I had
just installed Drive Image for the first time and wanted to run it. That
time I let DI fix the error, and immediately it reported the same type of
error at the end of the drive as well. I let it fix this error as well. I
used the computer during the day and in the evening when running Disk
Doctor the whole crash happened. I do not know if these two things are related.
I have ran several hard drive tests (IBM drive fitness test, PC-Doctor,
Scandisk, Checkdisk) but none report any problems. A utility from Ontrack
could not diagnose C: because it could not be recognised in some way, but
FDISK reports an active FAT16 partition on C:. Only a Drive Image utility
called PARTINFO gives information on the partition and reports problems,
although now under error code #108. I paste a few lines (I have the rest of
the report file if anyone is interested):
Disk 0: 993 Cylinders, 128 Heads, 63 Sectors/Track.
BiosExtensions: 0x100 Subsets (0x00000003): Access Lock/Eject
The BIOS supports INT 13h extensions for this drive.
============================ Partition Tables ==============================
Partition -----Begin----
------End----- Start Num
Sector # Boot Cyl Head Sect FS Cyl Head
Sect Sect Sects
------------------
- ---- ---- ---- ---- -- ---- ---- ----
---------- ----------
0 0 80 [ 0 1 1] 0E [
519 127 63] 63 4192902 [Large Drive Placeholders]
0 1 1
519 122 63 Actual Values
Error #108: Partition didn't end on cylinder boundary.
ucEndHead expected to be 127, not 122.
0 1 00 [ 520 0 1] 0F [
991 127 63] 4193280 3814272 [Large Drive Placeholders]
520 0 1
992 127 63 Actual Values
4193280 0 00 520 1 1 0B 992 127
63 4193343 3814209
=================================================================================
Disk 0: 3909.9 Megabytes
============================= Partition Information
==============================
Volume Partition Partition
Start Total
Letter:Label Type Status Size
MB Sector # Sector Sectors
------------- --------------- -------- -------
---------- - ---------- ----------
C:AKBAR FAT16X Pri,Boot 2047.3 0 0
63 4192902
ExtendedX Pri 1862.4
0 1 4193280 3814272
EPBR Log 1862.4
None - 4193280 3814272
D:JEFF FAT32 Log 1862.4 4193280
0 4193343 3814209
What can I do in this situation? DI does say it can fix the problem by
setting the file sectors lengths to be the same. But last time allowed it
to do this and then I ended up with a disk crash so I am wary.
On the other hand, the system seems to be working fine anyway and maybe it
is not as serious as it seems as long as I don't fill up my hard drive? I
don't know.
I asked IBM support and they said that I might want to wipe everything and
re-partition. Is this the only option? Does anyone have experience of Drive
Image fixing errors like mine?
Does anyone have ideas about this?
Sincerely,
Peter Wennersten
PCBUILD's List Owners:
Bob Wright<[log in to unmask]>
Drew Dunn<[log in to unmask]>
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