disk partition fails to remain active

[Salvatore]

Would appreciate some input.

After fdisking and formatting via win98SE and installing same, Single
drive, Single partition, the partition (Pri) never comes up with the
active bit set.

Setting it with Fdisk and checking it before leaving Fdisk and it stays
set. reboot and it is unset.

Swapped MB, CPU, Memory, Graphics.

Can hard disks behave this way?? W98 installed without a burp!!

I must have missed something. ~~?~~

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Would appreciate some input.

After fdisking and formatting via win98SE and installing same, Single
drive, Single partition, the partition (Pri) never comes up with the
active bit set.

Setting it with Fdisk and checking it before leaving Fdisk and it stays set.
reboot and it is unset.

Fdisk from where?

Swapped MB, CPU, Memory, Graphics.

A bit of a neurotic, are you?

Can hard disks behave this way??

Nope.
Well, sort of. If the drive has a bad sector 0 the cache may obscure that as
the write goes wrong but the read goes from cache, until the drive is reset.
But since it appears to hold the MBR and reads just fine, the sector is OK.

W98 installed without a burp!!

Except for making it bootable.

I must have missed something. ~~?~~

Bios overlay?

 

[Salvatore]

Fdisk from where?


A bit of a neurotic, are you?


Nope.
Well, sort of. If the drive has a bad sector 0 the cache may obscure that as
the write goes wrong but the read goes from cache, until the drive is reset.
But since it appears to hold the MBR and reads just fine, the sector is OK.


Except for making it bootable.


Bios overlay?

The Drive, one of 3, had previously been checked out for functionality on
another system. I later installed W98 on one of the drives to use it as a
test drive for checking out some motherboards. The test drive died while
checking out one board and a second drive, which originally had some bad
spots would not Fdisk during its self initiated surface check.

This drive is the last of the 3. Fdisk from an old DOS floppy or a Win98
Floppy yield the same results. Once rebooted, the active partition is no
longer active. Fdisk/mbr had been previously done. No drive overlay is
present.

With several motherboards at hand I switched to another set of components,
leaving the prior setup alone. Never had such a problem so I think I must
be overlooking something. These are used as utility drives. Just over a
gig apiece. Stupefying that all 3 went some kind of bad at once.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

The Drive, one of 3, had previously been checked out for functionality on
another system. I later installed W98 on one of the drives to use it as a
test drive for checking out some motherboards. The test drive died while
checking out one board and a second drive, which originally had some bad
spots would not Fdisk during its self initiated surface check.

This drive is the last of the 3.
Fdisk from an old DOS floppy or a Win98 Floppy yield the same results.
Once rebooted, the active partition is no longer active.
Fdisk/mbr had been previously done. No drive overlay is present.

How much time between install and trying to make this drive bootable?
Is it possible that the drive died in between?
Is the drive usable, i.e. can files be added, deleted, etc.
Or in other words, has the drive been checked for it's ability to write?

With several motherboards at hand I switched to another set of components,
leaving the prior setup alone. Never had such a problem so I think I must
be overlooking something. These are used as utility drives. Just over a
gig apiece.

Stupefying that all 3 went some kind of bad at once.

These aren't Micropolis, are they?
On reflection, I may have one in a group of those that exhibits this behaviour.
IIRC, one of the heads had a defective write element.

 

[Salvatore]

How much time between install and trying to make this drive bootable?
Is it possible that the drive died in between?
Is the drive usable, i.e. can files be added, deleted, etc.
Or in other words, has the drive been checked for it's ability to write?



These aren't Micropolis, are they?
On reflection, I may have one in a group of those that exhibits this behaviour.
IIRC, one of the heads had a defective write element.

Micropolis were awful in the end, contrary to their early excellence.

These are all Western digital caviar. I thoroughly checked them out 6
months earlier and they were fine. I was using one to checkout boards that
I change caps on and unknown status boards so I expect a glitch here and
there, but usually cpu re-seating or bios issues.

As unlikely as it is, It appears that 3 drives went bad all at once.
Other spare drives work fine. I have to check the third to be sure it is
bad. Set as slaves, these 2 now fail format.

Thanks for the input!!

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Would it bother you much if you answered these questions?

 

[Salvatore]

Would it bother you much if you answered these questions?

It appears that they died right there as I used them.

The first drive with a working copy of Win98 died after use in verifying a
MoBo repair, remaining installed, and during the checkout of a scsi MO
drive on the setup directly following. Later moving it to another
motherboard verified the drive was bad.

The second drive (preformatted) immediately would not remain active after
installing Win98. I could read the data on the drive and I could create a
file on the drive with a floppy based dos editor. Still, the active bit
would not set. This all in the span of several hours. Resuming a day
later, I could not write to the drive at all.

The third drive would not format. The % complete would erratically and
quickly increment from 0-100 and repeat. A day later, I successfully
ghosted one drive to this as a slave on another channel. It worked and
booted as pri master. I installed Win98 from scratch and it was fine. I
have not tried the format command on it but expect it to work.

Other drives work fine on any of the motherboards.

I hope this answers your questions adequately.

The SCSI MO Drive was bad.

When next an opportune moment I will scope the power lines to see what
might be there during power up and down.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

I give up. I can't seem to get a simple answer from you.
All you do is tell stories that appear to change with each post.

 

[Salvatore]

As one would expect as one continues to work on a problem. I thought I
was thorough and complete on my findings.
I did not know you sought brevity.
Then

One drive died.

Then another, slowly.

There are no problems with any other drives.