Hard Drive/Day

[Charles F. Munat]

Christopher Twigg wrote:

"IMO the IBM guy is full of crap.  If anything it's probably Win2K's
fault that it can't figure things out.  The drive name most certainly does
_not_ come from the partition table; it comes from the hardware itself
(which is why your BIOS is able to recognize IDE drives before you've
actually fdisked them); I think the IDE bus has some kind of
auto-detection mechanism.  Honestly if I were you though I'd be looking at
cabling and such though (an amazing percentage of hard drive problems are
related to cabling)."

Matthew Scholz wrote:

"linux fdisk does indeed have a few glitchy things like this.  The easiest
way to test if this is the problem: boot into DOS (from your 2k I
suppose) and run the M$ fdisk to make the partitions, then boot back into
linux and redo the file mounting setup.

"in other words, the name of the drive _does_ come from the hard disk
itself, but that _can_ get messed up by software..."

Reply:


I'd buy that it's W2K except that the IBM software (running on PC DOS from a
floppy) doesn't recognize the drive either. Could IBM really be that stupid?
I guess so. The real question is, Can I fix it? There's nothing wrong with
the cabling. I've checked and rechecked it. Plus, it would screw up
everywhere if it was the cable.

Maybe I'll boot DOS from a floppy and try to format it there. But I'm
concerned because it's a 30GB drive. I guess I couldn't really screw it up
much worse. I've also considered using something like wipe.exe to write
zeros to the first 8 GB to see if that helps...

Thanks for the help.

Chas.