Tannin
Storage? I am Storage!
The other day I bought a Samsung 160GB 8MB cache drive to replace my 80GB data drive with. Seeing as >128GB drives have been around for quite a while now, I didn't expect any issues.
Plonked it in, booted W2K SP4 off the X15-36LP same as usual, went to partition it from the Disk Management console.
As so often happens with W2K, up popped that stupid damn dynamic disk wizard. Seeing as I only meet it once every six or 12 months when I upgrade my hard drive, I can never remember how to avoid it. I don't want dynamic disks, for the love of Mike. I've read the blurb and they offer absolutely nothing by way of features that I want - and being an ultra-conservative by nature in matters technical, I'd far rather stay with the stuff I know. Apart from anything else, know that dynamic disks are supposed to be non-readable by non Microsoft operating systems or by older versions of WinNT/2K/XP in its various forms: that I don't need.
Being unable to remember how to tell 2K to initialise the drive as a basic drive, I followed the wizard and, of course, the bastard went right ahead and made it a dynamic drive, without giving me any option whatsoever about it. (God I hate Microsoft!) I wasted 20 minutes or so cruising the web looking for a way to reverse the damage (and damage it was, for any undesired and unrequested change to your system is, by definition, damage), finally gave up and resorted to tried and tested tools: a boot floppy and Gdisk. I zeroed the drive and tried again.
Safely on a basic drive now, W2K refused to recognise the entire drive, only offering me the option to format it as 128GB. The remainder of the drive, according to W2K's brain-dead disk management program, did not exist.
BIOS? I checked the Albatron site (it's an Albatron KX400 8XV Pro - a KT-400 board) but there seemed to be nothing there about disc access in the BIOS updates.
A built-in W2K problem? Doubtful: I would have heard of that by now, I guessed.
Back to the old tried and true: a W98SE boot floppy and Gdisk. Wiped the drive again, partitioned it to 160GB, all extended/logical, using a 110GB main partition (for photographs), plus two smaller partitions for assorted other stuff. Rather than format the partitions in Gdisk (which only understands FAT32), I left them unformatted and used the disk management console in W2K to format them as NTFS, retaining the default cluster sizes because not being able to defrag gets rather tedious. (More Microsft incompetence.)
Everything seemed fine. Except, after I'd copied ~70GB of data over and wanted to rename the partitions, I got errors. On the old drive (plugged in as a slave) I renamed "download" to "old down" no problem, but trying to rename "new down" to "download" produced an error claiming that the new name was illegal. In fact, I couldn't rename the volume to anything at all - all possible names, it seems, are illegal.
So I formatted it, using a long format, and now the volume can be renamed any time I like. All seems normal.
Worse was to come: I got obvious data corruption on one of the other partitions. Reformated that one too, again a long format with no problems reported. But I am still getting data corruption. Just this morning, a folder of 577 pictures that I was looking at last night went weird. Suddenly, 20% of the JPEGs are either corrupt & unrecognisable or (bizarrely) completely different files from a different partition!
Weird!
Housecall says I am virus-free.
A recent install of W2K SP4, latest Hyperion drivers. No sign of instability.
Athlon XP2500, 1GB RAM, Tekram SCSI card, nothing I haven't been running for ages, bar the CPU itself, which I just slipped in to replace a 2400. This does mean that the bus & RAM are running faster than they have been, but still well within specs for the board and RAM.
Should I swap the drive out for a 120GB unit?
Suspect my RAM?
Change motherboard?
Swap the IDE cable?
Panic?
The old drive, by the way, is still attached for the time being and I have not seen any sign of problems with it - though I've not tried too hard to break it, of course, as I contains valuable data. Also, I have a Sound Blaster 128. (Which last detail I only throw in in order to pay homage to the old, old adage: when you think of data corruption, think of Sound Blaster.)
I think I'll slip over to the office and grab a 120GB drive, then fit it using a new cable, ten sit back and await results.
Gahh .... Wish I could afford a 160GB SCSI drive.
Plonked it in, booted W2K SP4 off the X15-36LP same as usual, went to partition it from the Disk Management console.
As so often happens with W2K, up popped that stupid damn dynamic disk wizard. Seeing as I only meet it once every six or 12 months when I upgrade my hard drive, I can never remember how to avoid it. I don't want dynamic disks, for the love of Mike. I've read the blurb and they offer absolutely nothing by way of features that I want - and being an ultra-conservative by nature in matters technical, I'd far rather stay with the stuff I know. Apart from anything else, know that dynamic disks are supposed to be non-readable by non Microsoft operating systems or by older versions of WinNT/2K/XP in its various forms: that I don't need.
Being unable to remember how to tell 2K to initialise the drive as a basic drive, I followed the wizard and, of course, the bastard went right ahead and made it a dynamic drive, without giving me any option whatsoever about it. (God I hate Microsoft!) I wasted 20 minutes or so cruising the web looking for a way to reverse the damage (and damage it was, for any undesired and unrequested change to your system is, by definition, damage), finally gave up and resorted to tried and tested tools: a boot floppy and Gdisk. I zeroed the drive and tried again.
Safely on a basic drive now, W2K refused to recognise the entire drive, only offering me the option to format it as 128GB. The remainder of the drive, according to W2K's brain-dead disk management program, did not exist.
BIOS? I checked the Albatron site (it's an Albatron KX400 8XV Pro - a KT-400 board) but there seemed to be nothing there about disc access in the BIOS updates.
A built-in W2K problem? Doubtful: I would have heard of that by now, I guessed.
Back to the old tried and true: a W98SE boot floppy and Gdisk. Wiped the drive again, partitioned it to 160GB, all extended/logical, using a 110GB main partition (for photographs), plus two smaller partitions for assorted other stuff. Rather than format the partitions in Gdisk (which only understands FAT32), I left them unformatted and used the disk management console in W2K to format them as NTFS, retaining the default cluster sizes because not being able to defrag gets rather tedious. (More Microsft incompetence.)
Everything seemed fine. Except, after I'd copied ~70GB of data over and wanted to rename the partitions, I got errors. On the old drive (plugged in as a slave) I renamed "download" to "old down" no problem, but trying to rename "new down" to "download" produced an error claiming that the new name was illegal. In fact, I couldn't rename the volume to anything at all - all possible names, it seems, are illegal.
So I formatted it, using a long format, and now the volume can be renamed any time I like. All seems normal.
Worse was to come: I got obvious data corruption on one of the other partitions. Reformated that one too, again a long format with no problems reported. But I am still getting data corruption. Just this morning, a folder of 577 pictures that I was looking at last night went weird. Suddenly, 20% of the JPEGs are either corrupt & unrecognisable or (bizarrely) completely different files from a different partition!
Weird!
Housecall says I am virus-free.
A recent install of W2K SP4, latest Hyperion drivers. No sign of instability.
Athlon XP2500, 1GB RAM, Tekram SCSI card, nothing I haven't been running for ages, bar the CPU itself, which I just slipped in to replace a 2400. This does mean that the bus & RAM are running faster than they have been, but still well within specs for the board and RAM.
Should I swap the drive out for a 120GB unit?
Suspect my RAM?
Change motherboard?
Swap the IDE cable?
Panic?
The old drive, by the way, is still attached for the time being and I have not seen any sign of problems with it - though I've not tried too hard to break it, of course, as I contains valuable data. Also, I have a Sound Blaster 128. (Which last detail I only throw in in order to pay homage to the old, old adage: when you think of data corruption, think of Sound Blaster.)
I think I'll slip over to the office and grab a 120GB drive, then fit it using a new cable, ten sit back and await results.
Gahh .... Wish I could afford a 160GB SCSI drive.
