[Gllug] Hard Drive Problem

[Chris Bell]

On Wed 07 Aug, Jackson, Harry wrote:
> 
> 
> Installed NT on a box last night and then went to install RH6.1. For some
> reason it froze during the partitioning of the hard drive and we where
> forced to hard reboot.
> 
> We then tried to do an install from scratch using RH6.1. Just before the bit
> where you create the partitions it complained with an "error cannot read
> file" (or something similar). I tried windows and it hung completely. I
> booted up the system using the Linux care CD and noticed that two of the
> partitions where being read as having over 1.7Tb of disk space on the them
> which is impossible since its a 40Gb disk. I deleted all the partitions that
> I could and created some for Linux of 2Gb and tried again but got no joy,
> same error.
> 
> I was a bit dubious last night of using the mkfs tools to see what I could
> do because I have never had to use them. I did not see anything in fdisk
> that looked as if it could refresh the disk.
> 
> Has anyone seen this before? What has happened to this disk? Can you
> completely shag the disk beyond repair by screwing the formatting?  
> 
   M$ can get confused, especially when a drive has been previously used by
Linux, and can try to superimpose partitions. It is supposed to be possible
to sort the problem by going into DOS, then doing a M$
fdisk /mbr
but I would not care to trust it on a wanted system.
   I have used one of the Linux equivalents after M$ 95 corrupted a disc,
(unable to remember whether it was cfdisk or fdisk), which was kind enough
to flag the problem and offer to sort it for me. Whether NT would corrupt in
the same way is dubious.
   The safest way would be to check out the disc manufacturer's web site for
a purpose-designed facilities floppy. They can find very obscure faults, but
may then need to destroy all data on the disc and reformat it.

-- 
Chris Bell


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