stalker
July 21st, 2004, 04:46 PM
Hey all ...
1. I have currently 4 partitions on my Maxtor 2F040J0, Fireball 3, Ultra ATA/133 (DSP) hard disk. The disk is partitioned like that (I got "system" and "boot" titles from "Disk Management part" of "Microsoft Management Console"):
C:\ "contains" Windows98SE OS (and MS-DOS), and Linux and is primary drive, and labeled as "system partition"
D:\ "contains" WindowsXP OS, and Cygwin, it is first logical drive of extended partition, and labeled as "boot partition"
E:\ "contains" mostly mp3's (no OSs)
F:\ "contains" various stuff, mp3's, documents (no OSs)
And I have two so-called "hardware" bad-clusters on my D:\ partition. Well, I just assume they are "hardware", cause I had also one bad cluster from last Windows installation on E:\ partition too, but after formating volume, there is no more bad cluster anymore, so I suppose this one on E:\ partition was "software bad-cluster", and the one on D:\ partition is "hardware bad-cluster".
And I also thought they are "hardware", because they two bad clusters on D:\) were not "solved" by usual Windows in-built cmd-line function FORMAT [volume], though on the other hand Powermax's diagnostic test (utility for all ATA disks from Maxtor ...) didn't return any error codes, and maybe also to mention after formatting D:\ partition, and running "surface scan" on Windows98/SE only marked those two clusters as "Partially Damaged".
Sscandisk logs for D:\ partition are (it is 4 GB in size):
8192 bytes in bad sectors.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
2. So, I am planning to "low-level format" the disk with that Powermax utility from Maxtor home page as suggested, but since there is no way to "low-level format" only one partition at the time (but only whole hard disk), I will surely need to repartition the hard disk again.
And because my friend did this the first (and only) time, and as I remeber he did it with Partition Magic 8, and I use the partitions since then with no changes to partition's structure made, and yeah, I am a bit confused, how to do it right this time ...
- How is it possible to do it in "clean way", if Windows needs to be installed for Partition Magic to be able to do its job at all ??
- I imagine, in this way, one would partition hard disk, which already contains files, folders, and whole OS ??
- Is there any way to partition it from DOS, before installing Windows (i.e. when there are no OSs installed yet) ??
- Is there any other command-line program to do the job ??
- Maybe FDISK on Windows98/SE (the file resides in C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ ...), but again, this would require Windows to be installed previously partitioning) ??
P.S., I am not in hurry with this at all, but I would really like to know all options that are possible, especally the "cleanest", easyest, and fastest ...
Thanks for any help !!
1. I have currently 4 partitions on my Maxtor 2F040J0, Fireball 3, Ultra ATA/133 (DSP) hard disk. The disk is partitioned like that (I got "system" and "boot" titles from "Disk Management part" of "Microsoft Management Console"):
C:\ "contains" Windows98SE OS (and MS-DOS), and Linux and is primary drive, and labeled as "system partition"
D:\ "contains" WindowsXP OS, and Cygwin, it is first logical drive of extended partition, and labeled as "boot partition"
E:\ "contains" mostly mp3's (no OSs)
F:\ "contains" various stuff, mp3's, documents (no OSs)
And I have two so-called "hardware" bad-clusters on my D:\ partition. Well, I just assume they are "hardware", cause I had also one bad cluster from last Windows installation on E:\ partition too, but after formating volume, there is no more bad cluster anymore, so I suppose this one on E:\ partition was "software bad-cluster", and the one on D:\ partition is "hardware bad-cluster".
And I also thought they are "hardware", because they two bad clusters on D:\) were not "solved" by usual Windows in-built cmd-line function FORMAT [volume], though on the other hand Powermax's diagnostic test (utility for all ATA disks from Maxtor ...) didn't return any error codes, and maybe also to mention after formatting D:\ partition, and running "surface scan" on Windows98/SE only marked those two clusters as "Partially Damaged".
Sscandisk logs for D:\ partition are (it is 4 GB in size):
8192 bytes in bad sectors.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
2. So, I am planning to "low-level format" the disk with that Powermax utility from Maxtor home page as suggested, but since there is no way to "low-level format" only one partition at the time (but only whole hard disk), I will surely need to repartition the hard disk again.
And because my friend did this the first (and only) time, and as I remeber he did it with Partition Magic 8, and I use the partitions since then with no changes to partition's structure made, and yeah, I am a bit confused, how to do it right this time ...
- How is it possible to do it in "clean way", if Windows needs to be installed for Partition Magic to be able to do its job at all ??
- I imagine, in this way, one would partition hard disk, which already contains files, folders, and whole OS ??
- Is there any way to partition it from DOS, before installing Windows (i.e. when there are no OSs installed yet) ??
- Is there any other command-line program to do the job ??
- Maybe FDISK on Windows98/SE (the file resides in C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND\ ...), but again, this would require Windows to be installed previously partitioning) ??
P.S., I am not in hurry with this at all, but I would really like to know all options that are possible, especally the "cleanest", easyest, and fastest ...
Thanks for any help !!