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Woes installing 98SE on new 80g WD HD


DeadDude

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got 98se installed with no drivers so far.

but on a whim, I decided to 'check out' the drive...

jaclaz said

I would try contacting WD support, as what Deaddude bought was a disk with 156,301,488 sectors (of 512 bytes each).

every tool/utility I use to check out the sectors reports the drive has a total of 156,299,375 sectors.

MHDD v.4.6

HDAT2 v4.5.3

While using HDAT2, I see there IS actually the correct number of sectors... but the 'missing' sectors are in HPA at the very beginning of the drive.

Does anyone here know how to read the info HDAT2 displays? I see a lot of data that is nearly meaningless to me...

Humor me...

Find and download Hex Workshop (trial available) OR HDHacker.

Hook BOTH drives up and boot the GOOD drive.

Using EITHER tool, read Sector 0 of the PHYSICAL drive of the problem-HDD

Hex Workshop will ONLY read as many bytes as the BIOS indicates (unless it's boogered). HDHacker should ONLY show roughly 4-5 lines of data. This SHOULD be about 512b.

That model is an 80-gig and I sincerely doubt it has "Advanced" sectors (also pulled the specs). NO WAY (as jaclaz said)!!!


sector 0 000-1F0

33 c0 8e d0 bc 00 7c fb 50 07 50 1f fc be 1b 7c
bf 1b 06 50 57 b9 e5 01 f3 a4 cb be be 07 b1 04

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see looking at the drive in HEX....

BUT... ?!I see CHK files from Scandisk?!?!?! I RAN SCANDISK AFTER THE LOW LEVEL FORMAT! And since then, I have ActiveKilldisk'd this bugger 2-3 times! I see FILE0001CHK through FILE0285CHK

I also see a FAT12 table listed afterwards. I am labeleing it FAT 12 because it keeps listing FAT12...NO NAME... gibberish for 5 lines then repeats.

Weird things... cuz whenever I have run scandisk on this drive, it has never reported any errors... and the first thing I do is set scandisk to NOT save chains in files. I also check the root of the drive for corruption, and I've never seen these lost chain files there. but a hex view shows them?!

Did I get a refurbished drive? That came from a 4k 'home' and transplanted into 512b?

yes, I know. I sound totally stupid and crazy. With the tiniest bit of info, my mind is racing through possibilities now that I'm looking through HEX eyes... been years and years, and I never was good without a cheat sheet.. and I ain't got a cheat sheet... so if y'all know this hex stuff... I'm staring at it and will leave it as is for a little bit.... very very odd. 0'd HD has bits that were never placed there...?

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As another suggestion (that will go unlistened to as before), you should not play too much with that kind of tools, you know, kids, matches..... :ph34r:

Leave alone the HPA and forgive about the handful of sectors in it.

The only important thing is that you managed to get Windows 9x installed. :yes:

I would have appreciated a reply to the simple question I asked, but it seems like it's not my lucky day. :(

jaclaz

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I'm sorry jclaz if I missed something you posted...

The sectors reported by RPM matches the amount of sectors minus the HPA area.

I've never heard of HPA before.

Yes, I am in over my head looking through those things.

The BIOS reports the sector values matching the WD official count.

HDAT2 reports the drive is missing roughly 1.05 megs at the very beginning of the drive.

Looking through that 1.05 megs, I see the FAT 12 listings and over 5,000 FILECHK files broken into chunks of roughly 100 files with 1k-2k of gibberish between them.

EDIT EDIT

I am installing all the 98 drivers and whatnot at this moment. Afterwards, I will use this 80G and clone it using previous posts to one of my spare older FAT32 drives and see if the result works.

I am very curious about imaging now... if an image of a drive does NOT include the HPA, would that be able to cause some of these issues? I've done all these same steps for the last 15+ yrs of my life and never had anything like this occur.

I've always been able to simply low level format a drive to undo any partitioning issues I may have caused... and I've never seen data left behind from a low level format.... let alone zero'ing the entire drive...!

Am I just spontaneously stupid or something? Maybe I need to step back from this for a while... I swear I'll pull and Office Space on this tower if after this current install it still cannot image properly (and restore).

And I apologize if I miss responding to any questions posted here. If you ask again, I will properly answer. My mind is a jumbled mess over this. Thank you for your patience and understanding.

:)

Edited by DeadDude
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I don't care (much ;)) about the size.

I asked about the geometry.

With reference to this screenshot:

Second line from top how many Mb/cylynders/heads/sectors does RPM see?

At this point most probably values meaningful with a sector size of 512 bytes. :)

jaclaz

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drive goemetry RPM finds

gimem sec.

EDIT

across top of page

Hard Disk 1 76,318Mbytes 9,729 cylinders x 255heads x 63 sectors

Sector info (I hit F4)

# type row filesystemtype startingsector #ofsectors endingsector partsize

0 MBR Master Boot Record 0 1 0 0

1 Pri Unused 1 62 62 31

2 *Pri 1 Windowws FAT-32 LBA 63 40936547 40936609 20468273

3 Pri Unused 40936610 156299374 57681382

4 UNUSED

I hope the data requested is listed there, I have to run to the airport right this second. Lots more stuff happening then just this PC...

If it still isn't what you are asking for, I apologize again... please tell me where to look in RPM for the data.

I do not have Partition Logic. When I get back (about 2hrs) I will look for it.

EDIT EDIT

We passed in by each other with those last posts... :P:D

Off to airport, be back in a long bit.

thanks

Edited by DeadDude
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Yep, those are the data, clearly RPM senses the disk with 512 bytes/sector.

9,729 x 255 x 63=156,296,385*512=80,023,749,120

63+156299374=156,299,437 both CHS and LBA are more orr less correct (given the HPA region)

All is well that ends well. :)

Off to airport, be back in a long bit.

thanks

Go slowly, come back quickly. ;)

jaclaz

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both CHS and LBA are more orr less correct (given the HPA region)

??? Can you elaborate on that please? The HPA region is removed from the count? Honestly, I have no idea what I am talking about here (never heard of HPA before today).

I've read a few articles earlier on it, but don't understand how 'given the HPA region' fits in.

(to be clear, I'm just dumb and asking for clarification)

Thanks for all your help

would you agree then the most likely scenario is FDisk in the 98SE installer is not happy with this drive for some reason? But all other things should be fine so long as 98SE Fdisk don't get near this?

I am going to try the image thing tomorrow.

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I'm sorry jclaz if I missed something you posted...

The sectors reported by RPM matches the amount of sectors minus the HPA area.

I've never heard of HPA before.

HPA -

"Host Protected Area" (Dell MediaDirect)

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.shtml

"Hidden Protected Area" (Wiki-Wiki)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_protected_area

Either one will goober you, hence suggestion of using HDAT2.

Provided this is an 80gb (P)ATA HDD, I would think it was originally from a Dell Desktop, and not a Laptop of any sort. Read the Dell link I gave. Dell did some strange things to the HDD with MediaDirect.

Still, strange (a/l to me) that HDAT2 reported what it did.

Must have gotten a "used" Dell HDD with MediaDirect on it... Reading the Dell link given, I would assume that "inaccessible" part (FAT12?) is forever lost as far as usability.

Sorry, that's all I can provide. Beyond that, jaclaz is "the man". ;)

Edited by submix8c
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Well, HDDErase, most aptly recommended by jaclaz can, if you tell it to, remove the HPA, and recover that space. The downside of it is that you'll have to erase the disk once more.

BTW, when you 1st access a zeroed-out HDD's first sector with RPM, it'll report Unknown IPL because the IPL is all zeroes, as jaclaz already explained. However, what you should do at that point is move the cursor to the MBR entry in RPM's screen, then hit enter: focus will move to the box below... then hit the space bar until it says Standard IPL, and then hit <F2> to save. That's all. Bear in mind that if one partitons a disk with any other tool, and then looks at it with RPM, it'll probably also say Unknown IPL, whenever the IPL present is different of the one RPM consider Standard (and that means almost always...). In this case, if you trust the tool you used to create the IPL and want to let it be, that's OK, but if you prefer, you can follow the same procedure as for the zeroed-out HDD, and this will still result in RPM putting its Standard IPL in the place the one created by the previous tool was. I usually do it, as I prefer RPM's Standard IPL to any other. But here, of course, YMMV.

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Apart from the fun/exercise/experience/whatever there is not much sense to remove the HPA on that drive. :unsure:

The specs say that it has 156,301,488 sectors, it has the default 255/63 geometry thus you can have (since it is used with OS that use the good ol' convention of cilinder boundary) an unueven number of accessible sectors.

156,301,488/255/63=9729.317647.... cylinders

So the max value is:

9729 x 255 x 63 = 156,296,385

OP already has this space available, and it doesn't make IMHO much difference if he has a bunch (156,301,488-156,296,385=5,103) unused/unusable sectors at the end of the disk or, like it seems, only a few of them (156,301,488-156,299,437=2,051) as unused/unusable space at the end of the disk and the remaining as unused/unusable space in the HPA.

I mean nothing will change in the available/usable space so why attempt to fix a non-problem?

@submix8c

It's not "only DELL", AFAIK several other companies use/used the HPA, including IBM/Lenovo:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Hidden_Protected_Area

and Fujitsu-Siemens, more generally *anything* with Phoenix BIOS may have it.

But given the very small size of the area, I presume more likely that the HPA is WD installed in factory.

Specifically half the internet is upset about WD using the HPA on their "Mybook" external hard disks for every kind of crapware, this would be the first report I see about WD using it also on "normal" disks, but it is very possible.

jaclaz

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Apart from the fun/exercise/experience/whatever there is not much sense to remove the HPA on that drive. :unsure:

I agree. But, just for the record, here's an interesting blog page from Atola Tech about it, with a free tool that seems to be able to remove it without formatting, when warranted.

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well, I removed the HPA anyways and started fresh. Interestingly, the HPA came back after a few power cycles... and I noticed the BIOS splash screen starting listing "Booting from XPRESS blah blah"

I did some digging, and found the motherboard itself creates an HPA exactly as I had seen on this drive previously.

There is no option to deny it happening.

I looked at the existing installs today. None of them have the HPA. Very strange, but I simply gave up.

I was going to try the image crap again, but decided against it.

I am all ears if anyone is aware of software or method to clone this.

In the meantime, I have decided to simply add the bits by hand. I was able to recover the specific files off the existing server, and found a previously forgotten TXT file with instructions.

I wish I had the time to check the existing server beforehand, as I had already searched all the backup CDs and didn't find these files.

(apparently, the IMAGE had the files, but the W98 QIC files did NOT.)

I am also now in the process of changing the backup structure for his shop... the old method only worked because of using BOTH the image and the backups (QIC).

For unknown reasons he prefers the W98 backup program. Personally I had no issue with that until now.

I am thinking of a batch file utilizing RAR command-line to compress, and img burn (name?) to burn to CDR... automated.... multi-pass.... and putting the bits back in through the script...

any ideas?

Thank you Jaclaz and everyone else for the patience while I freaked out.

To be sure, would you agree the problem (for unknown and unimportant reasons right now) is W98SE Installer CDs FDISK? Whether loaded through the install process or booted into DOS and loaded from there? I had only used the W98SE installer disk for those steps (until ya'll pointed me elsewhere).

Now I *did* use the W2k CD to fdisk it at some point, but I am now of the impression that is irrelevant in the big picture.

Would you agree?

Edited by DeadDude
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I am thinking of a batch file utilizing RAR command-line to compress, and img burn (name?) to burn to CDR... automated.... multi-pass.... and putting the bits back in through the script...

any ideas?

You may find some (interesting :unsure:) ideas/batch code in CASBAH:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=21123

http://reboot.pro/4023/

(feel free to use the whatever parts you find useful, though of course being 9x you might have a "more limited" command processor), just in case:

Thank you Jaclaz and everyone else for the patience while I freaked out.

You are welcome. :)

To be sure, would you agree the problem (for unknown and unimportant reasons right now) is W98SE Installer CDs FDISK? Whether loaded through the install process or booted into DOS and loaded from there? I had only used the W98SE installer disk for those steps (until ya'll pointed me elsewhere).

Now I *did* use the W2k CD to fdisk it at some point, but I am now of the impression that is irrelevant in the big picture.

Would you agree?

No. :(

As much as the "key" word in data backup is redundancy, the "key" word in troubleshooting is "repeatability" (something that is simply missing from the number of different attempts you made, you should re-do eeverything from start form the "cleaned" disk :ph34r: and IF you have the SAME result THEN I would be able to agree, right now we all - at least myself - simply have NO idea of what actually happened).

The HPA re-created by motherboard is "queer" :w00t: , anyway, and would be worth IMHO further investigations. :angel

jaclaz

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As much as the "key" word in data backup is redundancy, the "key" word in troubleshooting is "repeatability" (something that is simply missing from the number of different attempts you made, you should re-do everything from start form the "cleaned" disk :ph34r: and IF you have the SAME result THEN I would be able to agree, right now we all - at least myself - simply have NO idea of what actually happened).

Ditto. :D

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