HD formatting trouble

[Kon-Tiki]

I've got this 80Gb HD hooked up as secondary master, and it gets recognized by BIOS. When I want to access it through Win98SE, it tells me it's unformatted, though, and asks me to format it. When I want to start formatting (Complete, as it won't accept Quick and'll perform Complete then anyways), it tells me there's not enough memory free to do so and that I should quit a few programs. It even says this when I'm running nothing but Windows itself. I tried going to Dos to format it, but it doesn't recognize drive D, it seems, so I can't format it on there too. Anybody here knows what I can do to start using that HD?

[Kon-Tiki]

It's solved now. As it recognized the HD through Windows, but not through pure Dos, but the formatting utility from Windows was acting up, I tried going into a Dos shell under Windows. 't Is formatting now

...
Result from formatting:
The formatting is complete.
Cannot write BOOT
The formatting has ended.

Looks like I'm not at the end of this yet ::)

[Solar]

Try the Ranish Partition Manager, http://www.ranish.com. It's free (as in beer), fits comfortably onto a floppy disk (or the disk image burned onto a bootable CD-ROM), it can set up any mix of partitions, and it can format FAT16 / FAT32 partitions. I'm using it since day #1, and it never failed me.

[Kon-Tiki]

The HD was just broken. Took it to the shop after testing it under Win98SE, Dos, WinXP, Knoppix, the bootable cd of Win98SE and some tools. Now I got one that formatted fine. I installed Win98SE on it, and what do I get? GODDAMN BLOODY FRIGGIN' THE SAME! It's to hit your head against the wall of! How the fucking hell am I supposed to get my comp up and running again?

[Kon-Tiki]

I hooked the HD up to dad's comp, and it booted fine from that one. Then hooked it up to mine again, and it gave the same error again... I guess this means it's a different problem than the HD, but how can I determine where the problem lies (without being able to access that comp)?

Edit: Tried part by part and ended up with it working with different IDE cables (well, 't was the first thing I tried). Let's hope it keeps working from now on. Thanks for the help, Solar. It's much appreciated

[I Lostalim]

The first thing you might want to look at is your OS and Chipsets....

Because certain production years of either, most specifically OS' didn't recognise anything over X number of Bytes (X depending on how recent your OS is for example)

DOS is highly unlikely to recognise anything at 80 Gigabytes (by the by, officially Gb would be Gigabits, but now I'm being fussy) Hence why you couldn't get DOS to recognise it.

Well having seemingly gotten it working, there's not really a lot else for me to add.

[Candy]

Except for a future reference of others, a list of common limits that your computer can trip over:

504MB (slightly below 512 actually): This is the limit of a certain bios function for reading a disk, which can only take 10 bits for the cylinder, 4 for the head and 6 for the sector, adding the 9 bits for the in-sector offset allows for 2^(10+4+6+9) = 2^29 = 512 * 2^20 = 512 MB of space. It's slightly below since there are actually 63 sectors, not 64.

2GB: The DOS formatting scheme allowed for no more than 2^16 blocks of each 2^15 in size (actually, that's a DOS bug... FAT16 should allow up to 2^16 size blocks but because of a rounding error that doesn't work). Hence, you can't create a FAT16 partition larger than 2GB. There's no workaround for still using FAT16, it's old beyond its days. Use some other system instead.

8GB: This is a more real limit. The people from above adjusted the function call to take up to 8 bits of head and that results in 2^4 more space, or up to 8GB. This is the limit above which you NEED LBA addressing because otherwise Windows chops off the top few bits and overwrites the rest of the disk again. Very bad if that happens, have only seen it happen once actually, but that was bad enough.

32GB: Very very hard limit. Some BIOSes (can say Award myself, didn't try others) physically can not boot with a >32GB harddisk attached that is recognised in ANY WAY. Thus, to boot you need a different disk and an operating system that detects the harddisk even though there's no mention in the BIOS. If this is your problem, find a 30GB disk for ease or get a new mainboard / BIOS upgrade / extra controller.

128GB: Physical limit. The ATA standard does not have space for more than 28 bits of total sector addressing, which combined with 9 bits for the byte offset makes for 2^37 bytes max, or 128GB. You NEED a maxtor extension and hardware capable of it on both sides to use more. All harddisks >128GB have it already, most controllers do too by now. On old computers you might run into this. Only solution is to limit it to 128GB or to buy a new mainboard / controller.

<probably some in between, just that the harddisks aren't available to show the problems>

4TB: Kind of a thing of the future, haven't heard anybody complain at least, but the old DOS partitioning scheme can't partition more than 2TB per partition, at an offset of max 2TB. So, even if you stretch the limit to it's limit (...) you cannot get beyond 4TB using the DOS partitioning scheme (the LBA one). Solutions are kicking out the CHS info and/or making a better one altogether.

<Seeing the past of the computing history, I cannot say that this list will be complete in any way. Expect to see it grow.>

[Eero Ränik]

Isn't the only way to get a 4TB partition using JBOD, at least at the moment?

[Candy]

Isn't the only way to get a 4TB partition using JBOD, at least at the moment?

You can't get a 4TB partition with this scheme. You can get two 2TB partitions however, if you make the first just that slight bit less than the 2TB and start the second at the end of it (offset < 2TB, size < 2TB). The disks for this don't exist yet, however, LaCie should have a 1.5TB external disk available. That's awfully close to this limit.

Using JBOD on a single raid controller you can get up to 8x the max disk size available, which iirc is 400GB. Combined they form 3.2TB, which is enough to annoy (same with win95 <osr2 on a 3.2GB disk) but not enough to make unaccessible. You'll hear a lot about this limit in about 2 years time, when everybody with big disks will trip over it, and one hell of a lot more in 3-4 years if people don't fix it consistently. Especially on these forums.

[Kon-Tiki]

Can you guys explain why, after removing 20Gb off of my HD, it still says it's got 'bout 800Mb free, instead of 20,8Gb? 't Is too odd for words.

[Candy]

Can you guys explain why, after removing 20Gb off of my HD, it still says it's got 'bout 800Mb free, instead of 20,8Gb? 't Is too odd for words.

Uhm... that's quite a context-sensitive question, which I can't answer without the context. Since you are quite probably assuming windows:

Windows puts stuff in the trash can (checked it?). It also does not free space immediately to speed up deleting the file, but can take a while. Try defragmenting it and see whether it's gone then.

[Eero Ränik]

Isn't the only way to get a 4TB partition using JBOD, at least at the moment?

Using JBOD on a single raid controller you can get up to 8x the max disk size available, which iirc is 400GB. Combined they form 3.2TB, which is enough to annoy (same with win95 <osr2 on a 3.2GB disk) but not enough to make unaccessible. You'll hear a lot about this limit in about 2 years time, when everybody with big disks will trip over it, and one hell of a lot more in 3-4 years if people don't fix it consistently. Especially on these forums.

8x500 GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 would be 4TB (well, actually 3.6TB due to difference between 10[sup]3[/sup] and 2[sup]10[/sup]). As far as I know, there's no 600 GB PATA/SATA hard drives out, yet.

[Candy]

there's a 500GB disk out? damn... kind of lost track after 120GB since I considered the 120 impossible to fill with useful and sensible stuff...

[Kon-Tiki]

Well, Win98SE, and I've got the habbit of deleting things by pressing Shift-Del, so it'll skip Trash Can (of which I don't see the purpose... if I toss something out, it needs to be gone. If I want to move something, I'll move it)

[I Lostalim]

I'm with you on that - [Shift]+[Del] is the only way I clear space on my drives... I never use the recycle bin at all.

On that note however, my drive being a tad smaller than yours though - I did have an occurance (under Win98SE) where I deleted nearly half my drive, and the cleared space didn't seem to show up until I ran either Scandisk or Disk Defrag - I ran both, can't remember which of the two cleared it up.