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Data Loss mixing FAT16 and FAT32

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dsziede

MIS
Feb 23, 1999
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I have a new 13 gig drive installed as a slave. It suffers from Altzheimers. It forgets stuff.<br>
<br>
I initially formatted it as a single FAT32 partition. The boot and secondary partitions on my main drive are FAT16. I moved a bunch of user data to the new drive, and installed some new software on it. The moves went OK. Initial edits of the data on the new drive went OK. (The software I used was PGP, Quicken, Word and Excel, and Winzip).<br>
<br>
Then things went sour. PGP refused to decrypt. Word failed to recognize documents as Word format. Quicken declared invalid header. I rebooted because that's what you always do with Windows. After the reboot, the new drive was empty! Over 100 directories of stuff went away.<br>
<br>
I called the disk vendor. He said the fault lay in my Win98 Upgrade OS. It is unable to handle a FAT16 primary and a FAT32 slave. Although I was skeptical, I reformated the new slave as a couple of 2-gig FAT16 partitions and put my data back. I exercised the new disk with checkdisk and the applications for the data. So far, no failures!<br>
<br>
I really want my slave disk to be FAT32. Will it work if I reformat the primary as FAT32 and re-install Win98 and all my software? Is there some easier path I can take?
 
Go to Windows Update on Microsoft.com and download the Large IDE drive patch for Win98. It may solve your problem. <p> Jeff<br><a href=mailto: masterracker@hotmail.com> masterracker@hotmail.com</a><br><a href= > </a><br>
 
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