Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2003 21:32:10 +0000 From: "Matthew Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: EZ-BIOS problems -Was: Why is Partition Magic so slow??
From: David Chien <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Turn off error/bad-sector checking and resizing will go far faster!
Thanks David...
I just found that last night as a matter of fact. It does go much faster. No sense in re-checking the same area of the drive making multiple test partitions in the same spot.
Might you have any idea what may be causing my problems uninstalling all my parytitions, EZ-BIOS, and then setting them all back up on my L70's 20MB HDD?
Here's my latest post to the CServe PC Hardware Forum, lengthy as usual:
---------------------------
I'm still hoping someone might have an explanation for the problems I'm still having trying to remove, and reconstruct EZ-BIOS and the several FAT32 partitions I had installed on a 20GB Hitachi HDD on my Toshiba Libretto sub-notebook that became corrupted in the course of a year.
I spent the entire day yesterday removing everything, zeroing with overkill.exe, and rebuilding from scratch many times. But I'm still experiencing some >very< strange issues that some hidden aspects (at least to me) of partitioning are causing.
Here's what I've established at this point:
* 1 After removing all partitions with Partition Magic 5.0, uninstalling EZ-BOIS (and/or leaving it and letting overkill.exe hit it), and zeroing the disk with overkill, the partitions will still be reported by running FDISK where I'll delete them a 2nd time.
* 2 After each attempt to get everything set up again, and EZ-BIOS installed, I found that Ghost was able to work properly creating and restoring images from and to every partition except the one at the beginning of the drive.
* 3 Without EZ-BIOS installed, I had no problem creating and restoring images to/from the 1st partition.
* 4 Each time I attempted to create an image of the 1st partition, Ghost would pass the point of backing up the data sectors on the partition, and continue to back up all of the free space. Attempts to restore the images would not only fail even though Ghost reported success, but the partitions would be totally inaccessible from a DOS prompt.
* 5 After a point where I had small test C:, D: and E: partitions set up that Ghost seemed to work with properly outside of the problem with the 1st partition with EZ-BIOS loaded, I created an extended partition and a small 39MB hidden logical drive to deal with Windows hibernation on the notebook. But when I rebooted to DOS, the D drive became inaccessible. By deleting the extended partition and logical drive, D was again accessible.
* 6 At one point while restoring and image to the 1st partition, I neglected to set the -ffx switch to deal EZ-BIOS with Extended Interrupt 13h disk access. When I ran PM to clean up the mess, the 1st partition was reported as EZ-BIOS! The GUI was yellow, and the report field showed some error for the partition.
I've had a number of other odd things happen, including D: becoming E and E: D: after some attempts to Ghost that failed... and now after the weirdness in #5 above, PM will only let me create a 2039.5MB partitions, though it's showing 17,429.9MB of the 19,069MB total.
Something< is very messed up somewhere in the many tables I'm not all that versed on. If overkill.exe doesn't in fact zero out things well enough for FDISK to think there are no partitions left, I'm stymied.
I'm wondering if EZ-BIOS is at fault, Ghost, PM, or probably the interaction between them all. I just can't seem to find just what keeps being corrupted from one attempt to rebuild to the next.
I do have PM's 'Partition Editor' as well as a standard hex editor if anyone has a suggestion on what to look for.
Any and all thoughts in all this are enthusiastically welcome!
Thanks for the many responses so far on this issue.
Shel (Matt)
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