What do you use to format your drives?
ginipig
OH, NOES
I'm having a bit of trouble using PartitionMagic to format one of my backup drives. Pm's quite easy when it comes to resizing clusters (currently @ 16k,) but I'm having an immense amount of problems when I try to format.
question: Are active partitions needed when you're formatting drives whose sole purpose would be to backup a raid-0 array? For some reason, when I format without active partitions, my next reboot would fail. I specified bios to not boot from any non-array drives (backups,) but after post, my computer would just freeze.
No messages, no 'invalid partitions,' nothin.
I'm afraid that if I do set active partitions on my backup drives, that this will tell my computer to try to boot from those slices, rather than my raids.
I've reinstalled my o/s 3 times already, due to experimentation (thank god I partitioned everything neatly on my raids.)
Help!!
question: Are active partitions needed when you're formatting drives whose sole purpose would be to backup a raid-0 array? For some reason, when I format without active partitions, my next reboot would fail. I specified bios to not boot from any non-array drives (backups,) but after post, my computer would just freeze.
No messages, no 'invalid partitions,' nothin.
I'm afraid that if I do set active partitions on my backup drives, that this will tell my computer to try to boot from those slices, rather than my raids.
I've reinstalled my o/s 3 times already, due to experimentation (thank god I partitioned everything neatly on my raids.)
Help!!
0
Comments
I use Maxtors maintenance floppy disk to format my drives, as I always do a low level on them (It's actually only write zeros) but it normally picks up problems better. It works on any manufacturer and even works on RAID controllers, which saves a lot of time.
What Drive/Partition are you formatting though? You need the partition with Windows on to be "active" and obviously, if you ofrmat that one, then it wont boot.
I have a quick question. Is it ok to pair atapi devices with harddrives on the same channel? For instance, pairing up my cd-rom with my 80gb on the primary channel, and my dvd with my 250gb on the secondary channel?
[edit] I'm also having trouble setting up ghosting on my backup drives. I think this is the reason why my computer would freeze after post, not neccessarily the format process.
It's fine to put ATAPI drives on with ATA drives on the same controller.
Are you using a newish BIOS on your motherboard? As I am sure some had fixes for large drives (over 130GB I think). Check you have the latest BIOS for your mobo.
Easiest thing for backup with PM is to NOT make parts on target, simply tell PM to copy partitions from source (your windows that does boot) to target for backup. Start with the primary partition, then a extended part with no logicals, then copy logicals into extended part. All logicals gives you a drive that has no master table for finding things in drive from beginning of drive. You need base master table structure for PM not to fault the structure, as PM runs mostly with Caldera DOS rule base set enforced, and Caldera "knows" that a primary per physical drive is a good thing and no primary maens invalid drive partition table.
What I do is this-- first tell it to delete anything on target drive. Then, copy primary part table. Then create extended for remainder of drive. Then copy logicals in order, then let it batch do the whole smoo (whle bunch) of implicitly defined batch tasks.
Note that PM 7 will not work worth beans to copy an XP install, it does not know the new journalling subversion that XP uses. Second, if you have a journal error in your XP file system and PM 8.0 is doing the copying batch, it will fail at time and place it hits the bad entries or actual files that do not correspond to journal entires. So, good idea to run CHKDSK in case of PM 8.0 failure (and gettign PM 9.0 would be nice idea when it comes out, it knows the newer winodws journalling better.
One last rule-- journals are placed on a certain place relative to data on various O\Ss. Trick is to move things so that so that the journals do not get mashed. Look at the appendixes on the PM CD, and the troubleshooting papers, ok??? They aremore O\S and error number specific.
Check out data on source drive, including journals, with chkdsk run startedfrom within a running Windows as follows:
open My computer
right click primary part (C: drive)
choose tools tab
click disk error checking function button
Now, continue to do this with second step being next greater letter of each logical drive, typically F and up if you have a burner and a CD drive in the box as I do. When you have doen this for all drives restart Windows.
NEXT part is important, and not really doced this way but it does work.... If you got errors and disk check (CHKDSK or check disk is other way to remember this) wants to rerun after automatic restart, let it. Essentially, unrepairable files entries and files will be wiped from journal if CHKDSK cannot repair on first pass, when it runs one second pass, and it makes notes to itself on first pass as to what happened so it "knows" what to handle more aggressively on second pass. This part applies to XP especially and might also work with Win2K partially and with NT SP 6.
NORMALLY a pure format failure with PM 8.0 means one of two classes of things:
Drives have logical mag marks for sector begin and end points, and zero packing or low-leveling the drive witht he right mfr util for drive restores these while totally destroying data as far as most O\Ss themselves are concerned (you would have to have a deep probing program that literally takes residual mag fields and recontrsuts layer by layer to try and recover data after this). IF a logical mag mark gets wiped or field mark gets weak for a sector mark, over time and possible head mispositioning results to asector that suddenly doubled in size as a wiped sector mark results in adoble size sector, then easiest fix is long process of zero-packing drive as far as making drive itself usable again is concerned.
If that fails, you have a physical media error in HD 90+% of the time, or bad media on platter to begin with if drive is new, or drive has had a head crash and amr for read\write head assembly is bent or head is literally scraped off arm by very hard crash-- hard failure, in other words, one other class of things. Normally a hard head crash will destroy part of media coating on drive platter also, as read\write head assembly is literally plowing through media coating with a hard head crash.
John.