I hope you can help me with a problem hard disk. The disk is an 80Mb Seagate ST1100 (yes, I know, it is a very old one). It was partitioned into drives C:, D: and E:. I decided to repartition it and reformat it. The original OS was DOS 5 and I used a DOS 6.2 disk to fdisk it. I removed first Drive E: then Drive D: and lastly Drive C: When I again ran fdisk to partition it all as Drive C: I was only able to access 4Mb of the disk and, try as I may, I could not get to the missing 76Mb! I decided to format it as DOS 6.2 and it would only format as 3.5Mb. After many attempts I did the only sensible thing: I ripped it out of the computer and replaced it with a nice new hard disk.
Still it worries me. As a matter of course several days later I put a floppy disk (which had been used in my computer) into another computer and I was informed that the floppy disk had the Junkie-1027 virus. Several other disks also suffered from the same Virus.
My question is, do you know what the offending hard disk should have in the boot record to enable it to run as normal? I have Norton Utilities which allows me to change the disk information, but I don't know what information needs to be there. I hope you can help me to get an otherwise perfect hard disk running again. Failing that, I suppose it will just have to be dispatched to that big hard disk heaven in the sky.
- Ron Richardson
There seems to me to be a simple explanation of your problem. However, whenever I encounter a seemingly simple answer I almost always assume I must be wrong. Unable to produce any other plausible solution I felt that it can do no harm to provide this as a possibility!
To get three virtual drives on your disk it must have been partitioned into a primary DOS partition (your C: drive) and an extended DOS partition. Two logical drives (D: and E:) must then have been created on this extended DOS partition.
Fdisk is not a straightforward program to use with even a moderately complex setup. You deleted the two logical drives, D: and E:, and deleted the Primary DOS partition, leaving no logical drives on the disk. But you may have left the extended DOS partition in place. Now, when you create a new primary DOS partition of the maximum size possible, it will only be as large as your old C: partition. To check to see if the extended DOS partition is still there, run fdisk and choose Option 4 -- Display partition information. If it is there, delete it by choosing Option 3 -- Delete partition or Logical DOS Drive. Then choose 2 -- Delete Extended DOS Partition.
The Junkie-1027 virus is not designed to harm your computer, and I could find no reference to your problem in any of the virus databases that I searched. Of course any virus can do damage through unexpected interactions with other software, but deleting the partitions should in fact have removed the virus.
If all else fails, the solution would to be try another partitioning program, such as PartitionMagic (Checkmark Technologies: (02) 9957 6970). Or brute force could be applied in the form of a low level reformat. This would require a special program obtainable from your hard drive manufacturer.
Alternatively, you could place the drive in the back of a cupboard so that in 30 years' time you can pull it out and show your grandchildren this old monstrosity that could only store 80Mb of data!
- Roy Chambers
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Category: Hardware
Issue: Jun 1997
Pages: 152-153
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On the trail of the missing megs