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Drive Geometry mis-reported - small partition

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nashcom

MIS
Apr 12, 2002
91
GB
I’m replacing a Windows98 PC on a peer-to-peer network with a new Windows XP PC, and temporarily installed the HDD from the Win98 PC as a slave into the XP machine to do a full data copy to transfer existing documents etc. When I first booted the XP PC, it gave a warning on the task bar saying that the slave (Win98) disk was low on space, even though I knew it wasn’t.

It’s a 10GB drive, but was reported in Windows as only 533MB.

I put it back into the original PC, but the partition info is still wrong. It appears correctly in the BIOS. It will boot to the Windows startup menu, and you can load ‘command prompt’, but if you try to change to a different directory it displays a FAT error.

I have Norton Systemworks , so I booted from the CD and ran the PartitionInfo utility. This says that there is a problem with the drive geometry.

Error message:

Info: Begin C,H,S values were large drive placeholders
Info: End C,H,S values were large drive placeholders
Actual values are 0 0 80 0 1 1 0C 70 125 56 63 1132418
Error #108: Partition didn’t end on cylinder boundary
UCEndHead expected to be 254 not 125
Error #108: Partition didn’t end on cylinder boundary
UCEndSector expected to be 63 not 56

The Disk Geometry info is:
Volume: NONAME
Errors: 2
PartSect: 0
# 0
Boot: 80
Bcyl: 0
Head: 1
Sect: 1
FS: 0C
Ecyl: 220
Head: 254
Sect: 63
Num Sects: 1,132,418

The partition info is:
Volume: C: NONAME
Errors: 0
Part Type: FAT32X
Status: Pri,Boot
Size: 552.9
PartSect: 0
# 0
StartSect: 63
TotalSect:; 1,132,418

Then the ‘unallocated’ partition record is:

Volume:
Errors: 0
Part Type: UNALLOCATED
Status: Pri
Size: 9209.1
PartSect: NONE
# …
StartSect: 1,140,615
TotalSect:; 18,860,310


It seems the problem is something to do with the drive geometry reporting EndHead to be 125 instead of 254 and EndSector 56 instead of 63.

However, I haven’t got a clue as to how to fix it, if indeed it is possible to recover the drive! I don’t know if SystemWorks has the tools to be able to fix it, and if so, how to proceed.

I’d really appreciate some help with this, as some of the data is critical, and I’ve just discovered that the backup routine hasn’t worked for over a week!

David
 
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