On 24 Nov 98 at 11:58, Sean Celestine wrote:

> I've been experimenting with my laptop and performed an FDISK with
> FAT32 and the Create Primary partition option, I then did FORMAT C:
> /S.  Now explorer shows a C: and a D: drive.  They both have the
> same files, and when I copy something into C:, it also shows up on
> D:.  If I delete the files from D:, they come back and the tree
> structure is again the same as C:.  How do I get rid of this D:.

  It sounds like you've got a corrupted partition table -- two
entries which both point to the same region on the drive.  Partitions
should NEVER overlap.

  Things I would do:

1.  Scan for a virus.  I don't know of one that has this effect, but
I also don't know of any legitimate code that should do this.  If the
problem *is* a virus, it must be dealt with before these other steps
can do any good.

2.  Back up everything from C: -- you may lose it all at step 3 or 4
below, so if you want it back you should save it now.

3.  Use FDISK to remove D: partition entry.  Fixing it *might* be
that simple.  Check that C: still exists and contains your files; if
not, you'll be glad you backed it up.

4.  If simply removing D: didn't fix it, remove C: as well and start
over.

5.  If that didn't work, try replacing FDISK with some third-party
tool such as Partition Magic.  I don't actually know for certain how
it would handle this case, but it knows a number of tricks that FDISK
doesn't.

6.  See if the drive manufacturer's web site offers a "low-level
format" utility for this drive.  Most don't for IDE/EIDE/UDMA drives;
SCSI controllers typically provide a formatting routine in firmware
for all SCSI drives.  If the drive is IDE/EIDE/UDMA and the
manufacturer doesn't provide such a utility, the drive is not meant
to be low-level-formatted -- do not attempt to use a generic utility,
which will probably have been implemented for older MFM & RLL drives.

David G

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