At 06:44 AM 5/22/2003, Peter Wennersten wrote:
>Hello List,
>
>I'd be very grateful if someone could give me a few ideas as to the following:
>
>When checking the properties for my c:\windows folder it reported several
>thousands of files totalling 505 MB but taking up 710 MB space.
>The same for check on d:\program files resulted in 530 MB and 830MB
>respectively.
>If I understand harddrives correctly this is a case of wasted cluster space
>and my reaction was to try to reclaim it.
>C: = FAT16 (size ca 2 GB) ,  D: = FAT32 (size ca 2 GB)
>
>I downloaded a trial version of Partition Magic 8 from Powerquest that
>would not carry out changes but I figured I would let me see if I could do
>something about these clusters.
>
>But, when starting the program (PM8) it reported the following:
>"Partition Magic has detected an error 110 on the partition starting at
>sector 63 on disk 1.
>The length of the partition in the partition table is incorrect.
>The CHS length is 4193217, the LBA length is 4192902, and the File System
>length is 40193217. Partition Magic has determined that the length can be
>changed to the correct value of 4193217. Would you like PM8 to carry out
>this change?"
>
>I answered "no" and saw a second message:
>
>"Init failed: error 117. Partition's drive letter cannot be identified"
>
>I then started writing this mail.
>
>I knew this error 110 existed since about 6 months but has chosen not to do
>anything about it since my system has been working fine and I didn't want
>to go through the hassle of reinstalling everything. But now I am thinking
>that maybe I should do something about it.
>
>So, to the questions:
>Can I trust Partitition Magic to correct the error without causing harm to
>my system?
>Or do I need to reformat and repartition my hard drive completely? What is
>the procedure in that case?
>
>Important:
>I once let DriveImage correct a similar problem and later that day after
>rebooting a few times I had a complete system failure when I was running
>Norton Disk Doctor with memoryresident Antivirus protection active and
>(stupidly) listening to a RealPlayer file from the harddrive. The system
>just sounded wierd and locked with different colours on the screen and
>after that I could not even boot into DOS anymore. "System not found" it
>said when trying to boot. After lots of problems recovering files I then
>proceeded to reinstall the system. I reformated and Fdisked (maybe in the
>wrong order, I don't know which be done first) but I never repartitioned.
>And lo and behold, trying to run DriveImage it again reported the same
>error 110 but since I was soo tired of reinstalling etc I decided to try
>and see if I could use the system as it was. And so far it has been fine to
>my knowledge. For at least 6 months, and god knows that I download,
>install, delete files on an almost daily basis, and regularly defragment my
>harddrive or move around files from C to D or vice versa etc. So I thought
>I could maybe live with this thing. But now second thoughts are coming into
>mind again....
>
>My system is an IBM Thinkpad 570 from 1999
>Win98 Swedish, 2nd edition I think
>PII 300, 64 RAM


Sounds like a real mess.  Can you trust Partition Magic?  The short
answer is: Yes.  Partition Magic is one of the best utilities around for
what you are try to accomplish and in my opinion better than the current
versions of Norton Utilities.

If you want to clean out the mess and start fresh, than you need to first
use Fdisk to remove the partition and than use Fdisk to build a new partition.
Then you format the new partition.

I have written complete instructions on using Fdisk and Format.  They can
be found on our website at: http://freepctech.com/guides.shtml

    Bob Wright
The NoSpin Group, Inc.
http://freepctech.com - http://nospin.org



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