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48 bit LBA on 98SE with SIL3112A


fishindude

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Well, this has been an interesting day, in the Chinese sense.

"A) Probably. But testing your partitions along the lines described by LLXX wouldn't hurt. See the theads on 48bit LBA (one started by LLXX, the other by Petr) here on MSFN."

I went back and read these again (oh no, Hex Hornets!), and tried to test as LLXX recommended. I filled the 200 GB drive (I already had some stuff on it) by copying the contents of my boot drive to it, then re-copying those contents to new folders repeatedly. This took a loooooooong time, and I did get 1 file copy error for an invalid file name. When I got it up to 180 GB, I checked my original files. According to LLXX, these are the ones that should be trashed when those 0's and 1's start wrapping around. They appeared to be OK - no gibberish, I opened a few documents, played a couple mp3's, everything seemed just dandy. Then I tried to run a scandisk. No dice. It stopped dead in it's tracks with a "you don't have enough memory" slap. I have 512, and a 1024 swap file.

Sooo...

"You could try using soporific's Auto-Patcher 98 to update all the system files:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Auto-Patcher-Win...ish-t80800.html

It's a fairly big download though... Got DSL/Cable?"

Yes, I do, and I did. Autopatcher is a cool program - the BUT will come momentarily. Anyway, it identified 147 patches for my system. I told it to install everything except IE6 and WMP, because the only MS software I use is the OS and a few things that come with it. About 35 minutes and a ton of re-boots later, it told me I was now clean and could take my place among decent folk. I got the cute little XP networking applet winking at me from the tray (useful) and something called Power Menu that will be leaving soon. Scandisk, however, still mocked me. So I went back to soporific's site and discovered a couple things. One was the suggestion that I should run Autopatcher again because, apparently, there are patches for the patches that it can't patch on the first run because I didn't have enough patches. So, I did run it again, and it again identified 147 patches for my system - the same ones that it said it had already patched. This goes against one of my Basic Rules for Not Screwing Up Your Computer (right behind "if it ain't broke don't fix it") which is "if you're gonna re-install, make sure you uninstall first". So, I didn't do it.

Another bit of info on his site was a recent post from a guy saying that the latest version of Autopatcher did not enable the ME scandisk and defrag updates. AHA!!! So, I went to the projects area, found MDGX's scanfrag (scary name, that) which is supposed to do the same thing. AND....NADA. Scandisk says no. Defrag, however, works. ?????????

My system, if it will help matters, is:

Abit NF7-S r2 board - nForce 2 ultra chipset, Soundstorm audio, SIL 3112 SATARaid controller

Mobile Barton Athlon XP 2400+ (OC'd to 2.4 GHZ, 400 FSB). Yes, it's very stable.

512 MB dual channel DDR, 400 mhz

Radeon X800 256 MB AGP card

2 DVD drives, each master of their own IDE

Floppy drive

60 GB Seagate, 200 GB Samsung hard drives on the SATA controller. Seagate has 98/XP/Linux partitions.

18" LCD, a couple printers on a print server, pretty good Altec 2/1 stereo speakers.

I'm going to try a scan from XP and see what that does.

Thanks again in advance for any and all ideas.

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Yes, I do, and I did. Autopatcher is a cool program - the BUT will come momentarily. Anyway, it identified 147 patches for my system. I told it to install everything except IE6 and WMP, because the only MS software I use is the OS and a few things that come with it. About 35 minutes and a ton of re-boots later, it told me I was now clean and could take my place among decent folk.... So, I did run it again, and it again identified 147 patches for my system - the same ones that it said it had already patched. This goes against one of my Basic Rules for Not Screwing Up Your Computer (right behind "if it ain't broke don't fix it") which is "if you're gonna re-install, make sure you uninstall first". So, I didn't do it.

Hey there Fishindude, sorry to hear you've been having issues, but we'll get to the bottom of this quick smart.

First, can you summarize what exactly it is that's wrong? It seems to be that scandisk doesn't work as intended with your drive that is larger than 137 GB, correct?

Secondly, you say that "it again identified 147 patches for my system - the same ones that it said it had already patched" --- Now, i find this hard to believe. One or two maybe but what you are saying is that AP installed 147 updates and now thinks it needs to do them ALL again. Simply not possible. My guess is that you aren't reading your logs and reports properly (my deepest apologies if i'm wrong about this). New logs and reports are APPENDED to the end of the text file, so you must remember to scroll down to the LAST report in order to be reading it correctly. There are warnings regarding this so i have tried to help you avoid making this mistake ... Sorry if i'm being patronising but this is the only thing i can think of that explains whats happening with regard to 147 updates mysteriously not installing.

Also, if you post me your log (and/or report) files then i can also help you see what's going on.

Sop.

ps - cheers to Dencorso who pointed this thread out to me.

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Hi, Sop.

My sincere apologies. :blushing: Thank you for not telling me to RTFM, although I richly deserve it. Your program is fine, and a great timesaver. As usual, operator error. My greatest coding achievement was the flying bird on a C64, so I have profound respect for those who know how to do it.

I wrote my last post at the end of a long and frustrating day of fighting with my computer. I'm used to fighting with other people's computers; me and my machine are actually on very good terms. I figured that as long as someone was taking the time to read this long sob story with my benefit in mind, I would at least try to be entertaining. It didn't occur to me then (it does now) that I might be demeaning to something that obviously took a lot of effort on your part. I also hadn't had the time to see some of the other stuff it installed. The universal USB driver is the bomb!!! Any of you out there running 98, you MUST have this! No more disconnect crashes - true hot swapping with an XP like manager applet. And that flash drive that would only work under XP before is no problem now. I also got one of my critical programs working, the one that''s really kept me tied to Windows. It only worked with XP before, I could never get it to work in 98. So, again, my apologies.

So, yes, my problem is that scandisk gives a "not enough memory" error as soon as I try to run it. The partition is 186 GB, FAT32. Defrag runs OK on it, at least it says it does. I'm not seeing any data corruption. The time stamp on scandisk.exe says created 2/11, which is when I installed it. I'm currently trying out other disk utilities.

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Hi, Sop.

My sincere apologies. :blushing: Thank you for not telling me to RTFM, although I richly deserve it. Your program is fine, and a great timesaver. As usual, operator error. My greatest coding achievement was the flying bird on a C64, so I have profound respect for those who know how to do it.

...

So, yes, my problem is that scandisk gives a "not enough memory" error as soon as I try to run it. The partition is 186 GB, FAT32. Defrag runs OK on it, at least it says it does. I'm not seeing any data corruption. The time stamp on scandisk.exe says created 2/11, which is when I installed it. I'm currently trying out other disk utilities.

Hey, no worries, thanks for clearing up what was happening...

... with regard to your probs with scandisk, one way to check out what's going on is to try to fill up the space. Get yourself a 700 MB avi movie of some sort, and make a bunch of directories and fill them up with copies of the file ... save some time by making a number of copies of the file with different file names ... at various points while doing this, run the last avi file you copied to make sure you can see it work for a few seconds, and then continue. Once the disk is full, see if the total data size is what you would expect and also make sure you can view the last file you copied. This sounds laborious but its done with only a few commands and it means you don't have to reply on a 3rd party program to tell you, you can tell yourself if your data is doing the right thing.

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Hi, Sop, and thanks.

Yes, I get that, and I've done something similar. I packed the drive with 180 GB of data. After a lot of rooting around, I didn't see any evidence of corruption. Every file, of various types, that I tried to open did without fault.

But what about ongoing maintenance? I'd like an easier way of verifying that the drive is operating correctly. With that in mind, I tried a lot of stuff in the last few days and I'm going to relate it here for the benefit of any other poor slob who finds himself on my path.

For a lot of reasons, I don't like to be in XP. So I wanted a solution that would run from 98. Unfortunately, I didn't find one that was really great.

First, the obvious. I downloaded MDGx's Diskminder version. This did not work. It looks like older software, and I don't think it's set up for larger drives. It identified virtually every file as corrupt.

So I went Googling, with the depressing but expected result that there just ain't much out there that will run on 98 anymore. I avoided obvious spyware, at least Spybot says I did, and tried out a bunch of stuff.

1) DiskChecker - a shareware prog. Says it runs on 98. Would not run in direct access mode (says disk is too large for FAT checking), only file access mode. Reported no errors in file access mode.

2) Tune Up Utilites. These are interesting, but only 2007 or below run in 98. The "Disk Doctor" and defragmenter don't even show up when installed in 98, although they did under XP. Strange. Extremely annoying, too - nothing is said on their site about this. 2 emails went unanswered. More later.

3) Iolo System Mechanic. Said 2006 would run on 98, but I had to install IE6 first. Grrr. Went back to your 98 Autopatcher and installed IE6 and all patches. I hate IE6! Installed System Mechanic, fired it up, and... it crashed. Undaunted, started it again, told it to scan the drive and not do anything, just report to me. and waited. And waited. Finally fell asleep waiting for scan to finish. Woke up, no HD activity light, touched mouse, system crash. Re-started. DANGER, DANGER!!! All icons show as shared web, icons evaporate on mouse over! Quick, add/remove. IT'S NOT EVEN THERE!!! I had to use System Mechanic to uninstall System Mechanic. Somehow, this worked, thankfully. Nothing else in this program did.

4) Emsa Disk Checker. This actually worked but was painfully slow - 6 hours for 200 GB drive.

So, I'm looking at Norton Systemworks, to the tune of 70 bucks with no trial. No, I can't do it, Norton is just too bloated and intrusive to pay that kind of money and not even know if it will work.

Disk checking in XP reports no errors. Of course, it doesn't report anything, which is not gonna make me happy. Installed Tune Up Utilities on XP, ran the "Disk Doctor", it reported no errors.

So, I guess I'm gonna go with it. If I have to check it from XP, well, that's the breaks.

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