WD 120GB Drive is MESSED UP... MS-DOS compatibility... HELP!!!

[DanDigital]

I have had nothing but problems with my Western Digital 120GB hard drive.

I am running Win98SE and a Pentium 500MHZ with 384MB RAM.

I bought the drive and installed it. That's about all that went smoothly.

I tried to use the software that came with the drive to partition it into six partitions. That didn't work. Three of the partitions were fine but three were running in "MS-DOS compatibility mode." I didn't even think it was possible for some partitions on a drive to run in one mode while others ran fine, but you learn something every day.

Next, I used FDISK to partition the drive. Great. Some of the drivers were still using MS-DOS compatibility mode.

I called Western Digital Tech Support and they suggested Microsoft's FDISK fix, which helped FDISK recognize drives over 64GB. I downloaded the fix and installed it. That worked fine for a while. I created the partitions, but for some reason when I looked at "Partition Information" in FDISK, only one of the partitions in the extended drive showed up and the other four were nowhere to be found.

But I didn't care because everything was working OK. The drives were no longer showing MS-DOS compatibility mode. I could save files to them, and everything was just hunky-dory.

Or so I thought.

Next, I started getting garbled data in two of the partitions, G: and H:. Every time, I would reformat the drive, but the third time it happened I realized something must be wrong.

I rebooted to the emergency disk and tried FDISK again. This time, I recreated all the partitions and they showed up in the partition information.

Except now, I had duplicate drives showing up in "My Computer." I had F:, G:, H:, and I:, which I created, and also J:, K:, L:, and M:, which were holdovers from the last failed partitioning extravaganza and did not want to go away.

Oh, AND, the new drives I made? Back to MS-DOS compatibility mode.

This is fricking ridiculous. Why is this so difficult? What am I doing wrong?

Dan

 

[nightowl17]

Sounds to me like you got a mess , If it were me I woyld do a lowlevil format which will comptley wipe your drive of everything and start from scratch.I would only use MS FDISK to partion . I have found that some thidr party disk managers do not work well with MSDOS and you will have a hard time getting a partions to show up without a lot of work , A good lowlevil format toll can be found at

http://www.maxtor

.com look for the program called PowerMax download it unstall it to Floppy and just follow directions .Easy I could do it ! Hope This Helps Solve Your Problem
nightowl17

 

[wolluf]

Not sure where your problem lies. Often problems in Windows when using other utilities (like ones supplied with hard drives) to format disk. You said you created 6 partitions originally. Only 4 are supported in current Windows PC set up (you can have extended partition which holds additional logical drives - but only 4 partitions per disk). If you've installed MS's 64GB fix can't see why you have problem - could try using ME boot disk to create partitions (MS website says ME defintely doesn't have 64 GB problem) - can download one from

http://www.bootdisk.com.

Personally I'd also consider upgrading to 2k or XP, which apart from being much more stable than 98, handle large disks better (NTFS filestore particularly). Hope this is of use.

 

[DanDigital]

Thanks for the help, you guys. I finally just said "forget it" and re-formatted the entire darn drive. Now I just have one huge partition with 111GB. But at least it works!!

Dan

 

[Hungster]

i think those newer drives are intend for FAT32 and NTFS on a new system board, i put in a WD 100 GB for a friend, and i had to put the jumper back to around a 30GB cuz the board doesn't recognized it that big

i personally use a 120GB 8MB of cache, and it works like a charm on my P3 1gig system

 

[DanDigital]

Well from what Ive heard there shouldn't be any problems with a 120GB on Windows 98SE. The only thing I had to do, like I said, was get a fix for FDISK to get it to recognize over 64GB. But that wasn't that big a deal. (Of course the drive manufacturers ought to SAY THIS in their manual, it would have saved me alot of aggravation!)

Dan

 

[Hungster]

so did you get a newer version of fdisk ?