Hi All:

I recently acquired a wd 36400 6.4 gig hd. Before installing it I took
out another hd that had Winnt with NTFS on it. I left the boot.ini and
all of the other files that are put on the C:\root intact. I planned on
reinstalling Winnt 4.0 back on the new drive anyway. After doing the
manual install of the drive I started fdisk off of a win95 bootdisk.
Standard ver.
I created a 2.048 gig primary partition and proceeded to do a format.
I immediately recieved the following message:"Invalid device parameters
from device driver." No matter how many times I tried same result. So
I booted up to Win95 and went to MSDOS. Same result. By now I was just
totally perplexed. I have never had a problem formatting. Anyway I got
on the phone I called WD tech support. They have no clue either. I
finally was able to do a format, but only from My computer. After the
format I tried to run Norton disk doctor. It was unable to access my
drive. I then started getting real concerned so I enabled partition
magic V. 3.04 to check the properties of the new D:\. It reported it
back as other file system/Fat16X. I tried to reformat in Partition Magic
and the only options are HPFS and NTFS. Putting all of the facts
together I concluded that the only way to save this mess was to install
Winnt and run disk admin. I did just that and proceeded to create an
extended partition with 2 logical drives within. After formatting and
thinking things were ok I shut down and rebooted into Win95. I went
back to the same two utilities and got the same result. The only real
difference now is that the entire D:\ is labeled other now in Partition
magic where as before the space after the primary partition was seen
as free space. Somehow my partition tables are not being seen as fat16.
I thought that by using disk administrator I could get true fat 16
parameter formatting. Anway I have run several tests on the new drive
including accessing,reading,writing,deleting,moving,etc... All seems to
be normal except that my diagnostic tools can't read the physical drive.

I am not real confident with this situation. Can I trust this drive with
my data? I want to have true fat16, not some hybrid that no one knows
anything about. I would appreciate it if you could ask around and give
me serious input.

Thankyou in Advance
--
Barry A. Clark