dencorso

With the 1 TB HDD disconnected, enter the Device Manager and jot down the identifier strings it gives for your HDDs that are working OK. Then try going into safe mode, and deleting all strange other HDDs that may appear in the Device Manager. You may have a leftover from previous blorked detections. Then get back to Normal Mode again, and connect the 1 TB HDD, and let's hope it gets detected OK. If this does not work, I'll have to muse over it some more. For now this is the last hypothesis that occurs to me.

The 2x multiplier was rewired to 6x in the processors, actually, not in the motherboards, see: The Strange Case of the K6-2/400. And since we're exchanging old bookmars about them, here's a very useful one: Getting the AMD K6-x+ to work on your Super Socket 7 board. In their time, the K6-x ruled! Those were good times, indeed!

Let me understand better what you're doing. Did you use FreeFDISK from inside a DOS Box within Win ME? Or is your BIOS capable of recognizing the USB disk unassisted and you've partitioned it in true DOS (say, from a DOS boot disk)? And which USBSTOR.INF are you using, the one I posted or the original Win ME one? Reboot into Win ME with the drive disconnected. Then connect it and let Win ME recognize and mount it. You ought to get sensible letters for all your partition, now, even thr unformatted ones.

Disconnect, wait for, say, 1 min, and then reconnect. The letters should be assigned.

Wow! That'd be an AMD K6-2+ 570 MHz, actually (according to the good old late BALUSC server), and it's really rare.

Because, here, I favor the good old principle of "Kill 'em all, and let God sort 'em out!" The bootsector is the 1st sector (= sector 0) but the backup is the 7th sector (= sector 6)... Moreover, the boot code is split and overflows to the 3rd sector (= sector 2) and its backup is duly at the 9th sector (= sector 8), whith the intervening sectors being the FSInfo (at sector 1) and its backup (at sector 7). All other sectors in the first 32 are usually zeroed out already, so there is no need, nor, however, any harm in zeroing them out. IMHO, if one zeroes out all 32, there's no need to count sectors and decide which to zero out.

Yes! The best of reasons. Facts. If you had followed my cross-thread quote in Post #8 (of this thread) to it's source, you'd know, by now, that wsxedcrfv tested successfully FreeFDISK 1.2.1 with a 750 GB HDD, as he reported in Post #44 of the thread FDISK and FORMAT large HDDs. This is a fact. As for the Ranish Partition Manager, I've reported using it to partition only HDDs up to 500 GB, but, more recently, I've bought an External USB 2.0 Seagate Expansion 1500 GB drive [with a Seagate Barracuda LP ST31500541AS (5900 rmm) 1500 GB HDD inside], which I partitioned sucessfully with RPM 2.43, although I wasn't able to solve the problem of RPM using 16 kiB clusters in DOS, so I reformated the partitions with FAT32FORMAT, under XP to get them to use 32 kiB clusters. This is a fact. However, I've only zeroed out the main boot sector and forgot about the backup boot sector of FAT-32, so FORMAT may have taken the sectors per cluster value from the backup boot sector and reformated using 16 kiB again. But I'm sure that zeroing out the first 32 sectors in each partition would be enough to convince the DOS FORMAT to use 32 kiB clusters. This is speculation, but I'm confident it's solid. So, at present I'm convinced that FreeFDISK may be the best free choice. Then you may format with the Win ME (DOS 8.0) FORMAT, or use FreeFORMAT, or format using the Windows Explorer. In any case, since the FreeFDISK will not have formatted the partitions you create, any of those formatters will use 32 kiB clusters as the default. Only RPM has a fixation in 16 kiB clusters.

If you're familiar with FDISK, the FreeFDISK will present no problems to your using it. You should try it. Afterwards, Win 9x/ME will assign letters to the unformatted partitions, so you can format them from the Windows Explorer menu.

That's ineresting... Can you post a link to it?

Sorry to hear it. It seems your OS got really messed up. So the full reinstall seems unavoidable. And, yes, the best policy is to keep a fully working image, to which you can fall back when things get ugly. I keep a library of dated images in an external USB HDD, and burn the best of them to Dual-Layer DVDs, just to keep on the safe side. You may call me paranoid... but I do hate to reinstall from scratch.

If you want to be able to defrag from Win 9x, yes. If you can live with not being able to do it, you may create just 3 partitions of about 460GB. BTW, if you're going to partition it on XP, you'll then need FAT32FORMAT.EXE, in order to be able to format the partitions to FAT-32 under XP.

Sure. But, as I've alrady said, once again things are behaving as expected: STFF! BTW, if you like FDISK, the FreeFDISK may be the tool of choice for you.

AFAIK, there's no localized version of tweakUI at all. So you're in a wild goose chase.

It's behaving as it should! If there is no partition defined, it won't get a letter! Here's how to solve it. Take a lot of care not to partition/format the wrong HDD. The first one RPM will show you usually is your boot disk. Once inside RPM, use F5 to move from HDD to HDD... press it once and wait, it sometimes lags a little before changing to the next HDD. After the screen changes, if it's not yet the Right HDD, then press F5 again. If you have just one internal HDD, pressing F5 once should move you to the USB HDD. The USB HDDs usually appear after all internal HDDs. >>> Whatever you do, you'll be doing it on your sole responsibility and by your own decision, not because I said so. <<< You've been warned.

Welcome to MSFN! I'm confident you're gonna like it here.

Try again using the attached USBSTOR.INF and see whether it makes any difference. If it doesn't, it's possible that your disk is formatted to NTFS from factory. Or not formatted at all. Do you know how to use the Ranish Partition Manager? Do you have access to a Windows XP (or 2k) machine? You'll probably have to repartition/reformat the HDD before it gets a letter (or more) assigned to it. usbstor110dp.zip

NUSB is from ME originally. You don't need it if you have ME... well, sort of. You may benefit from its tweaked USBSTOR.INF... Just rename the original and drop in the file from NUSB. Or, better still, grab the most up-to-date version of it from this post. If that isn't enough, get the HDD's VID&PID, using USBView, and let's add it to USBSTOR.INF.

@CyberyogiCoWindler, RLoew, and all others involved, myself included: It just dawned on me we were actively hijacking this thread, so I've decided to remedy this. All relevant posts are now moved and incorporated to this other thread, where they fit best, and will be easier to find, instead of ending-up buried in a ton of KEx posts, as would inevitably happen here. @Xeno86, and everybody trying to keep to the main subject of the present thread: Sorry for the (now solved) hijack!

OK. Thanks a lot! So, the K6-III+ does *not* support CMOVs, after all. Curiouser and curiouser... Now, here's some interesting reading, entitled "PIII = P2 + SSE": K. Diefendorff, Microprocessor Report, Vol. 13, Number 3, pp. 1-7, 1999.

I know. Although I've never owned a K6-III+, I've been interested in it, way back when. Then again, you failed to read the Application Note I've posted a link to properly: it contains a utility to chech that... here's the direct download link: cpuid_ex. So just download the .zip, extract the .exe, run it in a DOS Box, and we all shall know for sure! You're the only one around owning a K6-III+, so you're the only one who can do it and post the results here for all of us to know it. Just as an example, here're the results for my own Athlon XP-M 2800+ (overclocked, running @2333 MHz, and doing it at 42°C!): N:\>cpuid_ex features = 000017f7 CPU supports CPUID: y CPU supports CPUID STD: y CPU supports CPUID EXT: y CPU supports TSC: y CPU supports CMOV: y CPU supports MMX: y CPU supports 3DNOW: y CPU supports 3DNOW_EXT: y CPU supports AMD-K6-MTRR: n CPU supports P6-MTRR: y CPU supports SSE MMX: y CPU supports SSE FPU: y

It shouldn't. I never found any DOS program that had any issues with the patch.

Support for CMOV can be determined from the CPUID instruction results. Interesting enough, this AMD Application Note omits the K6-x+ and the even rarer K6-x-P.

Before you reinstall, Tmee, do try the RAM Limitation Patch with the /M option. You've got nothing to loose in installing the demo. And do read the original thread about your issue: Puzzling Registry Size Issue. After reading the first post you may want to jump to the solution, which is in post #63, although the full thread is very interesting and instructive.

Janis Joplin - Summertime