from Steve <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
When my drive was hosed, the only thing that would
read the messed up partitions was the partition tool
that comes with the installation CD of Mandrake (7.1
at the time).
Neither dos fdisk nor linux fdisk could see the
drive, but the Mandrake tool could. It's one of the
few reasons I bother to keep the Mandrake CD around.
(end of quote)
Where do you find this Diskdrake? Did linux fdisk not see this disk at all,
something like "Unable to open /dev/hda"? I have no use for MS-DOS FDISK due to
its buggy nature. Now I found a "Rescue" program for OS/2 that I downloaded
from Hobbes, and OS/2 Warp 4 installation diskettes again booted without the
trap. I removed the hard disks, rejumpered the second hard disk to be master,
which is the same jumper position as for being the only hard disk, at least in
this case. BIOS recognized it, and Linux saw it as /dev/hda.
Now from Joerg Dietze:
perhaps You did not load a driver supporting change of disks? With my
SCSI bios, removeable SCSI disks are only supported when system is
booting with the disk inserted. If You want to change media without
rebooting there may be a special driver.
(end of quote)
This Zip 250 previously supported change of disks under DOS; failure to
recognize change of disks is a new development, so I assume the Zip 250 drive
is on its last disk-reads/writes. I nearly always have a disk inside when the
system is booting. I lost some OS/2-based disk-recovery tools due to this
malfunction, trying to recover to read the disk directory. Whether they would
have rescued my data is highly doubtful.
Now from Steven of NZ:
Nonsense. The Slackware 3.5 kernels are perfectly stable.
Of course, if you use the incorrect kernel for your
hardware, it may "bomb out".
(end of quote)
Evidently the Slackware 3.5 kernels were not stable for the Trantor T130B SCSI
and Texel internal SCSI CD-ROM. I tested it. It bombed out. End of story on
Slackware 3.5. I never got far enough to see if parted 1.49 would run on this
kernel. I downloaded the slackware-current n_5380.s bzimage and color.gz to try
those with loadlin.
When I recovered the first hard disk, I couldn't boot OS/2 at all, I had OS/2
Boot Manager and DOS, both primary, and OS/2 boot partition (HPFS), Linux root
(type 83) and Linux swap (type 82) logical partitions. So Linux fdisk looked
like the best bet, and it worked. No way would I trust MS-DOS FDISK.
