MBR/Partition table woes...

[Sundog]

I'm rebuilding a system, and the intent is to make it a multiboot animal(DOS/NT/XP Pro). Somewhere along the way I messed up the hard drive.

DOS Fdisk thinks that I have 2 physical drives! It will only let me access the original 1st partition which it thinks is one entire drive! It's only 400 mb. I can access the rest on what Fdisk thinks is another drive.

Now, NT sees it all. So I partioned it as 1 large partition, and formatted it(7.6GB).

Back to DOS and it still only sees the 400MB on what it thinks is disk 1, and it sees the rest as disk 2.

I don't know what I did but I need to get this disk back to where Fdisk sees it as just 1 physical drive.

Any ideas of how to do that w/o buying a 3rd party product?

Thanks,

....jc

[Ryoko]

most drive makers have some sort of 'low level format' utility, which isn't a true low level format, it just writes 1's and 0's to the drive from start to finish and leaves them as 0's, which almost always gets rid of any troublesome partition issues (it worked for the 10gig laptop drive i have in my snesdrive assembly ;D)

i was having the same sort of issue (only double equal sized partitions) i tracked down the fujitsu zeroing util and wiped my drive. hasn't even looked funny at me since. so as long as the drive is blank or you don't care about whats on it, hunt down the drive makers 'low level format' utility and give it a shot. ^_^

note: you WILL need to find the one from the maker of YOUR drive, mixing different drive/utility makers is a bad idea, they all perform the 'formats' differently, and the drives themselves don't like it when you try to do it wrong.

Edited March 9, 2006 by Ryoko

[Sundog]

Thanks Ryoko!

I may have to do that. However, I did find this M$ article. And, It looks easy enough, so I'll give it a try 1st. If'n it doesn't do the job, Low Level Format here I go!

Thanks,

....jc