I have a six month old Maxtor ULTRA EIDE drive installed on the primary of
a FIC 503 + ....a Mitsumi CD Burner is installed on the secondary as a
master with a Teac CD reader installed as a slave.

I decided to set it up in a dual boot PC so I a FDISK it as a small 75 meg
primary FAT16  C drive...an extended partition with FAT 16 logical drives
...except I made the second logical (E) a FAT32 to install Win 98. I
planned on installing the system files and System Commander 4.03 on the C
drive. NT on the D drive FAT and 98 on the E drive FAT32. I have used this
setup before and it works well.

 I installed 98 on the FAT32 partition ..then I attempted to install System
Commander in order to handle the dual boot. During the install it put up an
error message that there were overlapping partitions and in the process of
the install it changed the partition tables so I could only see the primary
C and one logical D. I restored the Partition Tables with Norton Rescue and
ran Disk Doctor which saw nothing wrong..but I figured something must have
corrupted the partition table or boot sector so I used Maxtors ULTRA EIDE
utility to check, cleanse and restore the drive to factory specifications.
I then installed 98 and attempted to install System Commander....same error
message. I thought well System Commander doesn't like this setup so I
decided to let NT handle the dual boot but when I started a NT install it
got to the part where it checks the drive and reported that....
Setup has determined that one or more of your hard disks has more then 1024
cylinders.
At this point I ran professional diagnostics......Spinrite reports 528
megs.....Quick Tech Pro...reports a hard drive with 528 megs.
Maxtor tells me if their diagnostics doesn't see a problem then it is not
the drive.
At Boot the BIOS correctly shows the drive as CHS, UDMA 2, 5763MB.
I can perform tasks with Partition Magic 4.0 without any kind of error
message. NDD reports no errors. Drive image 2.0 reports an error message
that there is more then 1024 when attempting to restore a partition but
Drive Image 3.0 does not.

I am out of ideas....does anybody know what is going on ?

thanks

m

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