Deskstar 60gb w/ Disk Manager 2000 crash

[Shai Yallin]

Hello all,

This is the second time i'm trying to send this post, the first one
seems to have been

swallowed by Google

I've had for a while an 440bx-based machine with a 'generic'
motherboard. A couple of years

ago I bought a 60GB DeskStar IDE disk, and, finding out that the BIOS
didn't support >32GB

disks and that there was no BIOS update available, I installed it
using the DiskManager 2000

software that came with the disk. I then proceeded to install a
dual-boot system of WinME on

the primary partition (C, and an extended partition which contained
a logical drive

running Win2K (D and a logical drive for data & programs (E.

A couple of days ago I purchased a new machine and a copy of WinXP
Home to install with it.

I hooked the disk into the new machine and installed XP. However, upon
completing the first

phase of setup (the blue screen when it copies the files and then
boots into the GUI for the

rest of the installation), I got a message announcing that Windows
could not access HAL.DLL

and that I should replace it.

I then tried to fix the overlay using DM, to upgrade the DM version
and even rewrite the

MBR, resulting in absolutly nothing.

Later, I installed XP on an older, 20GB disk and hooked the
problematic one as a slave.

Surprisingly, I am now able to see the entire structure of the 3
partitions (disks, folders,

files), when some of the files (or folders) are accessible and others
aren't.

My only goal at this stage is to rescue some documents (and as much
other data as possible) from the disk before I'm sending it to the
oblivion of total repartitioning. I would greatly appreciate any kind
of advice on the subject. I'm pretty well aware of the relevant
terminology (I was an amature DOS programmer for some years), so
technical explanations shouldn't be a problem.

Thanx in advance,

Shai

 

[Shai Yallin]

Problem solved! Entire disk content retrieved! Check this out, you
might be interested.

After browsing the web for the entire of last night (CET), I was about
to lose hope, when a certain post at some newsgroup or other (I don't
recall which) jumped into my mind.

As I've mentioned before, I have deducted that the problem must be
either the BIOS or the HD itself. A search for the motherboard (Intel
D865PERL) came up with nothing. Then I searched for the disk model
(DeskStar 60GXP). It turns up that in addition to the series being
infamous for its tendency to head-crash (mine is a lucky specimen - so
far), it also has some very problems with different brands of boards /
BIOSes.

This model of disk has a jumper setting for number of CHS heads (15 /
16). It appears that with some BIOSes you have to set the jumper to
*15* heads - even though the disk spec. sheet says 16 heads - to make
them see the size of the disk is above 32GB.

Having made every mistake possible on the way to finding the solution
(including blanking my MBR. What a jurk), I turned to a tiny DOS-mode
program called PTS DiskEditor. Luckily, before blanking the MBR I
wrote down the parition info using NetZ's ResQDisk. From there it was
a little bit of searching and altering the partition tables and now
everything works.

I'm currently retrieving all my data and then I'm going to format the
disk.

I'm also going to mail the whole thing to Intel tech support so that
no one will make that mistake again.

Shai