linux QTParted disables hard drive

[Susan Bugher]

Funny you should say that. I moved a working Creative 52X CD-ROM to
the Compaq under discussion, and it wouldn't run. I had to use an old
SCSI external instead.

I was replacing a bad CD drive with a known good one. Just take the old
one out, put the new one in - or so I thought. . . Wrong!

I had to change the jummper settings. I bet that's what you need to do too.

Susan

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

Not surprising - X-Box is a game machine. A quick Google reveals this
Web page on how it is partitioned - in fact, there IS NO partition
table!

http://www.xbox-linux.org/docs/partidea.html

Interesting. If the information there is accurate, then the two x-box
drives I was sold had definitely been repartitioned, only
inadequately. In fact, the vendor told me that he had been using one
until recently on his Win2000 system.

After yesterday's postings, I went a few more rounds with Linux and
QTParted, and found I was able to restore the "virtual" Fat32
partition that makes the drive accessible to Windows 98 (but not to
DOS or FDisk).

A quick scan of the drive then showed a single hidden file of 4096
bytes, and the rest of the 7.63GB as free. I then ran Win98
defragmenter, and this showed a single cluster "which cannot be moved"
at the very beginning of the drive. Finally, I did a surface scan
with Win98, and it completed without detecting any errors.

So all that remains for me to do is to decide what sort of role I can
reasonably entrust to such a drive. Clearly it can never be a boot
drive, nor would I trust it to hold critical data. but maybe I could
use it to hold the Windows swap file and the temporary Internet files?

And here's an article on doing just that - putting an X-Box hard drive
into a regular computer (warning: very involved):
http://www.tech-forums.net/computer/topic/6704.html

And one has to have a working X-Box to do this.

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

Compaq BIOS does odd things. When I tried installing Red Hat Linux
7.3, Red Hat 8.0 and Mandrake (version I forget), they would not
install at all on my Maxtor 40GB HD. Even when I created and wrote
the partition table using their own partition table managers, each
would report being unable to read the partition table or that the
partition table was an unknown format.

OTOH, Red Hat 7.0 blew right on the machine with absolutely no
problems at all. Go figure.

Compaq certainly has no monopoly on weirdness. I happened to look at
the Win98 system information while waiting for scandisk to scan the
second of my two WD xbox drives, and noticed in the conficting/sharing
section that IRQ11 was listed as shared by:

1. the Video Adapter

2. the SCSI controller

3. the ethernet adapter,and

4. IRQ holder for PCI steering

This surprised me, as system properties/device manager shows no
conflicts. I then looked at the sysinfo's IRQ list, and was even more
surprised to find that while all these devices were sharing one IRQ,
three IRQs remained unused - #3,5, and 15

Next I went into device manager, and looked at the resources of the
three hardware devices. Sure enough, they all listed IRQ11. Moreover,
they all had "automatic configuration" checked, and reported "no
conflicts".

Finally, I unchecked the autoconfig box on each of them in turn, and
tried to change the IRQ setting. In each case, I got a pop-up saying
"this resource cannot be changed"!

The ethernet adapter isn't being used at the moment, but it pops up
the network password window at boot time, so it's there and running.
The SCSI adapter is running a hard drive, a zip, and a CD-burner
without any apparent difficulty, and the video card is managing the
display monitor while the other two devices are doing their thing.

Explanations anyone?

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

I was replacing a bad CD drive with a known good one. Just take the old
one out, put the new one in - or so I thought. . . Wrong!

I had to change the jummper settings. I bet that's what you need to do too.

Seems too easy, but I'll give it a try next chance I get, just to see.
I realized belatedly that I was sorely overtaxing the puny 145W power
supply with my collection of three hard drives, floppy, zip, and
CD-ROM, and decided to use an external SCSI for CD-ROM support.

The only possibility I can think of is that the Compaq requires the
Cable Select setting. I should add, though, that I had previously run
a 4X CD-ROM and an LG 4040B DVD burner in the same Compaq at the
normal settings (ie. master or slave) without any problems.

 

[dszady]

[...]
Seems too easy, but I'll give it a try next chance I get, just to see.
I realized belatedly that I was sorely overtaxing the puny 145W power
supply with my collection of three hard drives, floppy, zip, and
CD-ROM, and decided to use an external SCSI for CD-ROM support.

The only possibility I can think of is that the Compaq requires the
Cable Select setting. I should add, though, that I had previously run
a 4X CD-ROM and an LG 4040B DVD burner in the same Compaq at the
normal settings (ie. master or slave) without any problems.

You've got that right. One CD-Rom, One Cd RW, floppy disk and a new hard
drive I replaced my 90 watt power supply with a 180w (it burned out the fan
so I replaced the whole thing). I added it all up and wondered how it had
run in the first place.
Time for a DVD-RW. Yummy

 

[vince]

A quick scan of the drive then showed a single hidden file of 4096
bytes, and the rest of the 7.63GB as free.

Not sure how much more time you want to invest in this project, but from
where I'm sitting, looks to be fun and educating - provided you've got
the time.

To try and get rid of that last annoying bit of data, I'd have another
go at Knoppix and the "dd" command. As root -
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=4096 count=1
where /dev/hdX is the appropriate hard drive (eg. /dev/hdc for the
master drive on the secondary IDE channel).

 

[Susan Bugher]

On Fri, 06 Aug 2004 09:17:13 -0400, Susan Bugher


Seems too easy, but I'll give it a try next chance I get, just to see.
I realized belatedly that I was sorely overtaxing the puny 145W power
supply with my collection of three hard drives, floppy, zip, and
CD-ROM, and decided to use an external SCSI for CD-ROM support.

The only possibility I can think of is that the Compaq requires the
Cable Select setting. I should add, though, that I had previously run
a 4X CD-ROM and an LG 4040B DVD burner in the same Compaq at the
normal settings (ie. master or slave) without any problems.

It was a cable select problem - can't remember which way I had to change
the jumpers to get the drive recognized.

Susan

 

[Chaos Master]

Achim Nolcken Lohse, Achim Nolcken Lohse, Achim Nolcken Lohse.... did you
really write this article (<[email protected]>) in newsgroup
(alt.comp.freeware) at the date of (Sat, 07 Aug 2004 05:35:50 GMT)?

[IRQ sharing]

Next I went into device manager, and looked at the resources of the
three hardware devices. Sure enough, they all listed IRQ11. Moreover,
they all had "automatic configuration" checked, and reported "no
conflicts".

Finally, I unchecked the autoconfig box on each of them in turn, and
tried to change the IRQ setting. In each case, I got a pop-up saying
"this resource cannot be changed"!

The ethernet adapter isn't being used at the moment, but it pops up
the network password window at boot time, so it's there and running.
The SCSI adapter is running a hard drive, a zip, and a CD-burner
without any apparent difficulty, and the video card is managing the
display monitor while the other two devices are doing their thing.

Explanations anyone?

Disable 'Assign IRQ for VGA' on the BIOS, if it's enabled. I had a similar
problem here, but then it's my modem that shares IRQ with video card (causing
slow Internet connections), this helped...

[]s

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

Not sure how much more time you want to invest in this project, but from
where I'm sitting, looks to be fun and educating - provided you've got
the time.

To try and get rid of that last annoying bit of data, I'd have another
go at Knoppix and the "dd" command. As root -
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=4096 count=1
where /dev/hdX is the appropriate hard drive (eg. /dev/hdc for the
master drive on the secondary IDE channel).

Tried it, but no joy. The Linux FDisk screen output was:

1+0 records in
1+0 records out
4096 bytes transferred in xx seconds (xx bytes/sec).

I then ran QTParted again, and it showed:

01 - Partition Table empty

But when I created a new partition table, it showed the same
information as before:

01 /dev/hdc-1 free 7.45 GB start 0.03MB

And when I recreated the FAT32 partition and scanned it in Windows
Scandisk and Defrag, the immovable cluster was still there.

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

Achim Nolcken Lohse, Achim Nolcken Lohse, Achim Nolcken Lohse.... did you
really write this article (<[email protected]>) in newsgroup
(alt.comp.freeware) at the date of (Sat, 07 Aug 2004 05:35:50 GMT)?

[IRQ sharing]

Next I went into device manager, and looked at the resources of the
three hardware devices. Sure enough, they all listed IRQ11. Moreover,
they all had "automatic configuration" checked, and reported "no
conflicts".

Finally, I unchecked the autoconfig box on each of them in turn, and
tried to change the IRQ setting. In each case, I got a pop-up saying
"this resource cannot be changed"!

The ethernet adapter isn't being used at the moment, but it pops up
the network password window at boot time, so it's there and running.
The SCSI adapter is running a hard drive, a zip, and a CD-burner
without any apparent difficulty, and the video card is managing the
display monitor while the other two devices are doing their thing.

Explanations anyone?

Disable 'Assign IRQ for VGA' on the BIOS, if it's enabled.

I'd try it if I could, but this Compaq BIOS doesn't give the user any
such option.