C
Christopher Altmann
Hello!
I'm really desperate.
System Setup: AMD XP2600 w. Samsung Spinpoint SP1614N (160GB) HDD.
Knowing a lot of OSs are having troubles with giant partitions,
I initally splitted the Harddisk into 3 parts C(8GB),D(64GB),E(76GB)
-all of them FAT32-since I intended to install WIN98 (don't ask,
various reasons).
Later on I divided C into 2 4GB partitions, to allow a seperate
WINXP (SP0) install for testing purposes (NTFS).
This setup ran fine for a couple of days, when all of a sudden
drive C (boot) got corrupted. A dir suddenly showed garbage
and completely wrong amounts of used and free space.
After a reboot no sysem could be found.
I luckily put all relevant data to D and E, thus leaving
C as the boot drive or system drive for win98 (which was
completely gone now). All I could do was reformat C
and start a repair to boot the still existing XP on drive I
(G and H are CD/DVD). This ran fine again for some days,
until C got scrambled again (even before I had the time
to setup WIN98 again). This has now happened the 3rd
time in the last couple of days. Just now I added
the "EnableBigLba" setting to WINXP to gain access to
the full size of the HD. I have not yet reformatted
or mapped the remaining MBs. Now I'm waiting for the
next reinstall-cycle.
I know, I should have checked before installing WIN98/WINXP,
but I was under the impression, that if I use an OS
incapable of accessing all of the HD, I should have no
problems accessing at least the space the OS is "seeing".
Well, I guess was wrong.
So some questions now arouse:
- is this FAT corruption (scandisk is telling me this)
"expected behaviour" in this kind of setup ?
(e.g. OS with a HD way toooooo large)
- why does this error occur without any noticeable
pattern. (4 days ok, 5th day: boom) ?
- why is it always C, the XP-partition (I) seems to
remain untouched?
Ok I directed all temp-files to C:\TEMP,
so during work, there's a lot of heavy
access there, I guess. But on the other hand,
there's heavy access on the other drives as well.
- S.M.A.R.T. ist telling me nothing at boot time.
Can it be, that the HD is bad, but SMART won't
notice it?
Is there a way/tool to find out more on this?
- If it's just a "logical" (not physical) error
what can I do to overcome this nasty behaviour
in the future? It's really annoying to recreate
the boot-partition all the time.
I wonder how long it will take for the error to
spread onto the other partitions.
I'd also really like to use WIN98 on this machine again.
But ok, if there's no way, so be it.
ANY hints appreciated
Thanks
Chris
I'm really desperate.
System Setup: AMD XP2600 w. Samsung Spinpoint SP1614N (160GB) HDD.
Knowing a lot of OSs are having troubles with giant partitions,
I initally splitted the Harddisk into 3 parts C(8GB),D(64GB),E(76GB)
-all of them FAT32-since I intended to install WIN98 (don't ask,
various reasons).
Later on I divided C into 2 4GB partitions, to allow a seperate
WINXP (SP0) install for testing purposes (NTFS).
This setup ran fine for a couple of days, when all of a sudden
drive C (boot) got corrupted. A dir suddenly showed garbage
and completely wrong amounts of used and free space.
After a reboot no sysem could be found.
I luckily put all relevant data to D and E, thus leaving
C as the boot drive or system drive for win98 (which was
completely gone now). All I could do was reformat C
and start a repair to boot the still existing XP on drive I
(G and H are CD/DVD). This ran fine again for some days,
until C got scrambled again (even before I had the time
to setup WIN98 again). This has now happened the 3rd
time in the last couple of days. Just now I added
the "EnableBigLba" setting to WINXP to gain access to
the full size of the HD. I have not yet reformatted
or mapped the remaining MBs. Now I'm waiting for the
next reinstall-cycle.
I know, I should have checked before installing WIN98/WINXP,
but I was under the impression, that if I use an OS
incapable of accessing all of the HD, I should have no
problems accessing at least the space the OS is "seeing".
Well, I guess was wrong.
So some questions now arouse:
- is this FAT corruption (scandisk is telling me this)
"expected behaviour" in this kind of setup ?
(e.g. OS with a HD way toooooo large)
- why does this error occur without any noticeable
pattern. (4 days ok, 5th day: boom) ?
- why is it always C, the XP-partition (I) seems to
remain untouched?
Ok I directed all temp-files to C:\TEMP,
so during work, there's a lot of heavy
access there, I guess. But on the other hand,
there's heavy access on the other drives as well.
- S.M.A.R.T. ist telling me nothing at boot time.
Can it be, that the HD is bad, but SMART won't
notice it?
Is there a way/tool to find out more on this?
- If it's just a "logical" (not physical) error
what can I do to overcome this nasty behaviour
in the future? It's really annoying to recreate
the boot-partition all the time.
I wonder how long it will take for the error to
spread onto the other partitions.
I'd also really like to use WIN98 on this machine again.
But ok, if there's no way, so be it.
ANY hints appreciated
Thanks
Chris