I am not clear on what you are trying to do.  I also do not have
extensive knowledge of fdisk, but I would consider the following...
Fdisk will complain in some form if you configure CMOS parameters
that exceed the disk capacity.  It will not care if you set the
disk size in CMOS below capacity.  Some versions of DOS you mention
do not support 163 mb drives.  Some labels are intended for more
than one series of IDE drives, you might inspect the model number
to find out whether your drive supports all configurations listed.
After that, I would go to Microsoft website and download delpart.exe
which will completely wipe any partition information from the drive.
Make sure the drive is set in CMOS to the parameters you intend
to format the drive under, and use Dos 6.2x or newer. After using
delpart.exe, the CMOS and fdisk should agree what size disk is present,
and you should have no further trouble.
tom turak

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, December 20, 1999 7:11 AM

Today, I had a similar problem... I found an old ide drive with several
configurations, from 41 Mb up to 163 Mb listed on the manufacturer's
label.  It had a plain white label saying 120 Mb.  It appears to have been
FDISKed to 163 Mb using SMARTDRV and DOS 6.20, as it appears as a non-DOS
partition in the lower DOSes that I had handy (3.20 & 5.0).  It will not
take a DOS FORMAT - "media or track 0 bad".  If I attempt to FDISK it
while set to the 122 Mb configuration, I can delete the Primary DOS
partition.  It then shows 122 Mb, no partition set - but when I try to
set a primary partition, it crashes.  Rebooting, and FDISKing again,
it once again shows a 163 Mb partition on a 122 Mb total disk space.

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