Extra logical drive appears, can't understand this

  • Thread starter Thread starter Neil Harrington
  • Start date Start date
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Neil Harrington

I just built a Win98SE system using some new but mostly old parts. The
Maxtor 20GB drive is one of the old parts, and this is a drive that I had
previously partitioned into 15 and 5 GB. I installed Win98SE on logical
drive C of course, the 15GB partition, after deleting everything, but I did
not reformat as I knew it was already FAT32.

After finishing the installation with all motherboard and hardware drivers,
at some point I saw that I not only had a second 5GB logical drive D, but
also a THIRD logical drive E. Where that came from I have no idea, since I'm
sure I had originally partitioned the HD in only two. I couldn't access E,
Windows told me it wasn't formatted and asked if I wanted to do that, so I
did. I thought it might be some small space left over previously for some
unknown reason. But when I formatted it it turned out to be another whole
5GB logical drive.

This is obviously impossible, my having 25 GB of logical drives on a 20GB
hard disk. Yet everything seems to work. I thought that D and E might
actually be the same space, but this doesn't seem to be so. If I copy some
files to drive D and other files to E, that's where they go and they show up
separately on those two drives. If I go to the MS-DOS prompt it's the same,
D and E appear to be separate drives with separate contents.

Poking around in System Properties | Performance shows that "Drive D is
using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system," but there's no apparent
performance problem and I can't find anything on Microsoft's site that
explains or has any bearing on this.

I'm not using any disk compression or anything like Disk Manager, etc. The
motherboard is a new DFI AZ30-TL and all the related drivers are from the
CD-ROM supplied with it.

Any ideas about what's going on here?
 
Neil Harrington said:
I just built a Win98SE system using some new but mostly old parts. The
Maxtor 20GB drive is one of the old parts, and this is a drive that I had
previously partitioned into 15 and 5 GB. I installed Win98SE on logical
drive C of course, the 15GB partition, after deleting everything, but I
Click to expand...
did

I stopped reading with any interest after this.
not reformat as I knew it was already FAT32.

After finishing the installation with all motherboard and hardware drivers,
at some point I saw that I not only had a second 5GB logical drive D, but
also a THIRD logical drive E. Where that came from I have no idea, since I'm
sure I had originally partitioned the HD in only two. I couldn't access E,
Windows told me it wasn't formatted and asked if I wanted to do that, so I
did. I thought it might be some small space left over previously for some
unknown reason. But when I formatted it it turned out to be another whole
5GB logical drive.
Click to expand...

At this point, I was saying to myself "yep, right, uh-huh, sure, whatever
you say"
This is obviously impossible, my having 25 GB of logical drives on a 20GB
hard disk. Yet everything seems to work. I thought that D and E might
actually be the same space, but this doesn't seem to be so. If I copy some
files to drive D and other files to E, that's where they go and they show up
separately on those two drives. If I go to the MS-DOS prompt it's the same,
D and E appear to be separate drives with separate contents.

Poking around in System Properties | Performance shows that "Drive D is
using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system," but there's no apparent
performance problem and I can't find anything on Microsoft's site that
explains or has any bearing on this.

I'm not using any disk compression or anything like Disk Manager, etc. The
motherboard is a new DFI AZ30-TL and all the related drivers are from the
CD-ROM supplied with it.

Any ideas about what's going on here?
Click to expand...

Yep, got lots of ideas about what''s going on here.
But this is a nice newsgroup, so I can't say as am not a politically correct
person.
 
Svend, thanks very much. The problem is fixed, though I still don't
understand it. :-/

As mentioned, going to the MS-DOS prompt showed drives C, D and E. But when
I restarted in MS-DOS mode, only drives C and D showed up. This made me
think I was right previously about D and E actually being the same space,
perhaps with two different FATs or something like that to explain why files
sent to D and E showed up on those drives respectively.

I booted from the Win98 setup disk and reformatted drive D, since that
seemed to be the cause of the problem. When I restarted from the HD it
started in Safe mode, and presto, E was gone. A normal restart and E is
still gone, so now everything is the way it should be.

That does look like a very useful utility though, and I will download it.

Thanks again.

Neil
 
Lil' Dave said:
did

I stopped reading with any interest after this.


At this point, I was saying to myself "yep, right, uh-huh, sure, whatever
you say"
show

Yep, got lots of ideas about what''s going on here.
But this is a nice newsgroup, so I can't say as am not a politically correct
person.
Click to expand...

It's been just wonderful hearing from you anyway.
 
Neil Harrington said:
It's been just wonderful hearing from you anyway.
Click to expand...

Why not snip that pollution that you two Outhouse users left? It's
not like it was readable.
 
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