ranish/presizer/fdisk problems

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

Spent several hours last night trying to resize and reconfigure the
hard drives on my Win98 desktop, with very disappointing results.

Disk 1/0 (DOS Fdisk/Presizer134) was formatted Fat16 with a 500MB C:
partition, and 1GB unused, while Disk 2/1 was entirely empty.

My plan was grow the C: partition to fill disk 1/0 and convert it to
FAT32 and to format all 2.5GB on disk 2/1 to FAT32 as drive D:. I also
wanted to grow disk 3/2 from 500MB FAT16 to its full 2GB capacity and
convert it to a FAT32 drive E:

I worked off a boot floppy, and immediately ran into conflicting
information with Presizer:

1.It showed the both of the FAT16 partitions as resizeable and
moveable, but wouldn't allow me to grow either.

2. If I deleted the logical and extended drives on either of the two
formatted disks, it gave an error message and warned me not to
continue.

3. It would let me shrink the extended partition to 1MB, but not move
it to the end of the disk.

It turned out to be totally useless in this case, and yet I've used it
successfully before under both Win98SE and Win95.

Dos Fdisk also misbehaved. It would accurately report the size of the
2.5GB unused disk (2/1), but format it only to 2GB. When I tried to
run it in this configuration, it accepted several hundred MB of data,
then suddenly vanished from Winows!

Ranish Part243 was my last resort, but it also produced conflicting
and unhelpful messages. It successfully surface verified all 2.5GB of
disk 2/1, then formatted it as FAT32, but when I rebooted, DOS Fdisk
still saw the disk as unpartitioned. Ranish also repeatedly gave an
urgent warning "no active partition set on this disk!), but provided
no apparent solution. When I tried to set the active partition in
Fdisk, it of course told me that only the C: drive can be active.

After monkeying with all this for some hours without success, I
finally set disk 1/2's MBR to "Standard IPL" and formatted it as "LBA
FAT32" (IIRC). After this, I was able to Access the full 2.5GB under
Windows.

However, disturbing anomalies remain, namely:

1. In System Properties/device manager, the first disk listed is shown
as I:, whereas there is no "I:" drive in "my computer".

2. in the "perfomance" window, drive "D:" is shown as running in MSDOS
compatibility mode, but the details link is inactive

3. in the settings menu for each drive, none of the letter settings
are adjustable, including my SCSI hard drive and two SCSI zip100s.
I've never seen this before. Only the IDE CD-ROM drive letter is
editable.

Yet, according to Windows, all drives and controllers are "working
properly".

This situation leaves me with a C: drive limited to 500MB FAT16
(Windows informs me it's "too small to convert to FAT32), which is in
constant danger of running out of space. The inadequate kludge is to
install programs on the 2.5GB D: drive running in MSDOS compatibility
mode.

Meanwhile I have 1GB I can't use on disk 1/0 unless I want to format
it as an extended/logical partition, and another 1.5 GB on disk3/2 in
the same situation.

I'm almost desperate enough try Partition Magic, despite the fact that
none of the three versions I've used in the past have ever been able
to detect all of my hard drives, let alone correctly analyse and/or
configure them.

Can anyone shed light on this mess?

PS. will try running Knoppix 3.4 to see what QTParted has to say, but
recent experience with other drives hasn't inspired confidence in this
tool either.

 

[Roger Johansson]

Spent several hours last night trying to resize and reconfigure the
hard drives on my Win98 desktop, with very disappointing results.

Disk 1/0 (DOS Fdisk/Presizer134) was formatted Fat16 with a 500MB C:
partition, and 1GB unused, while Disk 2/1 was entirely empty.

You have not told us if you have any valuable content on the 500MB but I
assume you have something you want to keep there.

The first you should do is to copy all valuable stuff from that
partition to the other hard disk, then fix the first hard disk so you
can use all of it as one partition.
There is a freeware program called "save partition" or savepart you can
use to copy a partition, and compress it to half the size at the same
time.

If you do not have much to save on that 500MB partition you do not have
to be careful. Delete everything and start over with a new windows
installation.

My plan was grow the C: partition to fill disk 1/0 and convert it to
FAT32 and to format all 2.5GB on disk 2/1 to FAT32 as drive D:. I also
wanted to grow disk 3/2 from 500MB FAT16 to its full 2GB capacity and
convert it to a FAT32 drive E:

I worked off a boot floppy, and immediately ran into conflicting
information with Presizer:

I have never used presizer so I cannot advice on that one.

DOS Fdisk is very unreliable with newer operating systems and cannot
format partitions bigger than 2 GB.
Don't trust DOS Fdisk.

1.It showed the both of the FAT16 partitions as resizeable and
moveable, but wouldn't allow me to grow either.

2. If I deleted the logical and extended drives on either of the two
formatted disks, it gave an error message and warned me not to
continue.

3. It would let me shrink the extended partition to 1MB, but not move
it to the end of the disk.

It turned out to be totally useless in this case, and yet I've used it
successfully before under both Win98SE and Win95.

Dos Fdisk also misbehaved. It would accurately report the size of the
2.5GB unused disk (2/1), but format it only to 2GB. When I tried to
run it in this configuration, it accepted several hundred MB of data,
then suddenly vanished from Winows!

Ranish Part243 was my last resort, but it also produced conflicting
and unhelpful messages. It successfully surface verified all 2.5GB of
disk 2/1, then formatted it as FAT32, but when I rebooted, DOS Fdisk
still saw the disk as unpartitioned. Ranish also repeatedly gave an
urgent warning "no active partition set on this disk!), but provided
no apparent solution.

If you study the display in Ranish a little more you will see how to set
partitions as active, move the cursor to the partition and the column
which says that it is inactive and then you can change it into active.

When I tried to set the active partition in
Fdisk, it of course told me that only the C: drive can be active.

After monkeying with all this for some hours without success, I
finally set disk 1/2's MBR to "Standard IPL" and formatted it as "LBA
FAT32" (IIRC).

You did this in Ranish I guess, that is good.

After this, I was able to Access the full 2.5GB under
Windows.

Are you still using the windows you have on the 500MB?
I guess so. Then you will very likely get problems as you describe
below, because you have disturbed the installation.

However, disturbing anomalies remain, namely:

1. In System Properties/device manager, the first disk listed is shown
as I:, whereas there is no "I:" drive in "my computer".

The best way to fix these problems is to reinstall windows after setting
up the partitions as you want them, but you may have to save some
valuable content and delete the windows directory first to get a new
clean setup.

If you try to reinstall windows on a disk where there already is a
windows folder you will get problems.

2. in the "perfomance" window, drive "D:" is shown as running in MSDOS
compatibility mode, but the details link is inactive

3. in the settings menu for each drive, none of the letter settings
are adjustable, including my SCSI hard drive and two SCSI zip100s.
I've never seen this before. Only the IDE CD-ROM drive letter is
editable.

If you have both CD and other medias connected you should be able to
save all useful content first and then you can delete everything on your
C drive and start from fresh.

Yet, according to Windows, all drives and controllers are "working
properly".

This situation leaves me with a C: drive limited to 500MB FAT16
(Windows informs me it's "too small to convert to FAT32), which is in
constant danger of running out of space. The inadequate kludge is to
install programs on the 2.5GB D: drive running in MSDOS compatibility
mode.

This will not work, you need to fix your C drive to begin with.

Meanwhile I have 1GB I can't use on disk 1/0 unless I want to format
it as an extended/logical partition, and another 1.5 GB on disk3/2 in
the same situation.

I'm almost desperate enough try Partition Magic, despite the fact that
none of the three versions I've used in the past have ever been able
to detect all of my hard drives, let alone correctly analyse and/or
configure them.

Can anyone shed light on this mess?

PS. will try running Knoppix 3.4 to see what QTParted has to say, but
recent experience with other drives hasn't inspired confidence in this
tool either.

OTParted works quite well, but you may have to do some later adjustments
when windows tells you it wants to fix the partitions better.
When I used QTParted to resize partitions windows complained afterwards
that something was not exactly right and asked if it could fix the
problem. I replied yes and it all worked fine after that.

Try to get win98se instead of win98, it is much better.

 

[Wayne D]

Spent several hours last night trying to resize and reconfigure the
hard drives on my Win98 desktop, with very disappointing results.

Disk 1/0 (DOS Fdisk/Presizer134) was formatted Fat16 with a 500MB C:
partition, and 1GB unused, while Disk 2/1 was entirely empty.

My plan was grow the C: partition to fill disk 1/0 and convert it to
FAT32 and to format all 2.5GB on disk 2/1 to FAT32 as drive D:. I also
wanted to grow disk 3/2 from 500MB FAT16 to its full 2GB capacity and
convert it to a FAT32 drive E:

I worked off a boot floppy, and immediately ran into conflicting
information with Presizer:

1.It showed the both of the FAT16 partitions as resizeable and
moveable, but wouldn't allow me to grow either.

2. If I deleted the logical and extended drives on either of the two
formatted disks, it gave an error message and warned me not to
continue.

3. It would let me shrink the extended partition to 1MB, but not move
it to the end of the disk.

It turned out to be totally useless in this case, and yet I've used it
successfully before under both Win98SE and Win95.

Dos Fdisk also misbehaved. It would accurately report the size of the
2.5GB unused disk (2/1), but format it only to 2GB. When I tried to
run it in this configuration, it accepted several hundred MB of data,
then suddenly vanished from Winows!

Ranish Part243 was my last resort, but it also produced conflicting
and unhelpful messages. It successfully surface verified all 2.5GB of
disk 2/1, then formatted it as FAT32, but when I rebooted, DOS Fdisk
still saw the disk as unpartitioned. Ranish also repeatedly gave an
urgent warning "no active partition set on this disk!), but provided
no apparent solution. When I tried to set the active partition in
Fdisk, it of course told me that only the C: drive can be active.

After monkeying with all this for some hours without success, I
finally set disk 1/2's MBR to "Standard IPL" and formatted it as "LBA
FAT32" (IIRC). After this, I was able to Access the full 2.5GB under
Windows.

However, disturbing anomalies remain, namely:

1. In System Properties/device manager, the first disk listed is shown
as I:, whereas there is no "I:" drive in "my computer".

Well. This is going to be a challenge. From reading over your post.


Re: 1.It showed the both of the FAT16 partitions as resizeable and
moveable, but wouldn't allow me to grow either.

I have never used this program but as with other partition programs, you
must have space to grow the partition.

ex. Lets say you have a 30 GB hard drive with 3 partitions all set at 10
GB. If you wanted to grow partition #1, you would first have to reduce
that size of #2. If you wanted to grow partition #2, you would have to
reduce that size of #1 or #3

Re: 2. If I deleted the logical and extended drives on either of the two
formatted disks, it gave an error message and warned me not to
continue.

It gave you a warning because you will loose any and all data on those
partitions. You are deleting the partition.

Re: 3. It would let me shrink the extended partition to 1MB, but not move
it to the end of the disk.

Do you have room at the end of the disk? Did you leave space at the end
of the disk? If the space is empty, you should be able to grow that
partition unless the program that you are using is not able to keep the
data while you change the size of the partition then a delete and create
operation would be required.


Also other items to note:


1) Fat 16 can only be formatted to a max to 2 GB

2) A 500MB FAT 16 drive is that same cluster size as FAT 32 thereby
really no difference

3) Make sure your data is backed up on some other dive!!

4) Only have one drive in the computer. This saves the possibility of
mistakes that can occur while looking over all the different partitions.

Let us know what you find with Knoppix.

Regards

Wayne

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

You have not told us if you have any valuable content on the 500MB but I
assume you have something you want to keep there.

Just my Windows98SE installation and stuff accumulated on the Desktop

The first you should do is to copy all valuable stuff from that
partition to the other hard disk, then fix the first hard disk so you
can use all of it as one partition.
There is a freeware program called "save partition" or savepart you can
use to copy a partition, and compress it to half the size at the same
time.

If you do not have much to save on that 500MB partition you do not have
to be careful. Delete everything and start over with a new windows
installation.

Ouch. Maybe I'll try using QTParted to grow it first.

I have never used presizer so I cannot advice on that one.

DOS Fdisk is very unreliable with newer operating systems and cannot
format partitions bigger than 2 GB.

Didn't know that. In fact the reference books I have for Win98SE
suggest the opposite, since they recommend converting to FAT32
precisely because it can handle hard drives larger than 2GB!

Don't trust DOS Fdisk.

I've had lots of reason to distrust it, but haven't found any
alternatives. The authors of Ranish and Presizer both suggest Dos
Fdisk for deleting partitions.

...

If you study the display in Ranish a little more you will see how to set
partitions as active, move the cursor to the partition and the column
which says that it is inactive and then you can change it into active.

Will have a look. So restricting active partitions to the C: drive as
Fdisk suggests is bad advice?

You did this in Ranish I guess, that is good.


Are you still using the windows you have on the 500MB?
I guess so. Then you will very likely get problems as you describe
below, because you have disturbed the installation.

Well, the strange thing is that before these manipulations, Windows
Device Manager was telling me there was a problem with the boot drive
caused by the wrong drivers for the primary IDE controller (strangely,
there was no such warning about the secodary hard drive on the same
controller). That warning has disappeared, and according to Windows,
there's nothing wrong with the first drive.

The best way to fix these problems is to reinstall windows after setting
up the partitions as you want them, but you may have to save some
valuable content and delete the windows directory first to get a new
clean setup.
You may be right....

OTParted works quite well, but you may have to do some later adjustments
when windows tells you it wants to fix the partitions better.
When I used QTParted to resize partitions windows complained afterwards
that something was not exactly right and asked if it could fix the
problem. I replied yes and it all worked fine after that.

I think I'm going to back up the data on my first and second drives
and try to grow the first with QTParted. I'm still not sure of the
problem with the second drive though, or how to fix it.

I ran QTParted just now under Knoppix 3.4, and it gave the following
puzzling report on hdb:

part 01 hdb1 type "unknow" status blank size 2GB
part 02 hdb-1 type free status hidden size 393.7MB

Knoppix placed an icon for the drive on the KDE desktop, but Koqueror
couldn't open it, saying it couldn't determine the filetype and none
was specified. Under Windows, this drive is shown as being a full
2.5GB in size.

hda1, hdd1, and sda5 are all accessible with Konqueror.

Try to get win98se instead of win98, it is much better.

Sorry, I should have mentioned that it's Win98SE that I'm running.

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

...

Well. This is going to be a challenge. From reading over your post.


Re: 1.It showed the both of the FAT16 partitions as resizeable and
moveable, but wouldn't allow me to grow either.

I have never used this program but as with other partition programs, you
must have space to grow the partition.

ex. Lets say you have a 30 GB hard drive with 3 partitions all set at 10
GB. If you wanted to grow partition #1, you would first have to reduce
that size of #2. If you wanted to grow partition #2, you would have to
reduce that size of #1 or #3

Re: 2. If I deleted the logical and extended drives on either of the two
formatted disks, it gave an error message and warned me not to
continue.

It gave you a warning because you will loose any and all data on those
partitions. You are deleting the partition.

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough in my post. I meant that I had
already deleted both the logical and the extended partitions on the
target disk with Dos Fdisk, and when I then ran Presizer, it warned me
not to continue because the extended partition was "missing or
damaged". So there was no data to lose.

Re: 3. It would let me shrink the extended partition to 1MB, but not move
it to the end of the disk.

Do you have room at the end of the disk? Did you leave space at the end
of the disk? If the space is empty, you should be able to grow that
partition unless the program that you are using is not able to keep the
data while you change the size of the partition then a delete and create
operation would be required.

When I had only the primary and the extended partitions on the disk,
Presizer would let me shring the extended partition down to 1MB at the
boundary of the existing primary dos partition, but it wouldn't let me
shrink it in the other direction. There was nothing in the space
occupied by the extended partition, since I had just deleted the
logical partition, and the extended, and recreated the extended, since
Presizer insisted on it. Whatever I did, I couldn't grow the primary
partition to fill the remaining 1GB of the disk.

Also other items to note:


1) Fat 16 can only be formatted to a max to 2 GB

2) A 500MB FAT 16 drive is that same cluster size as FAT 32 thereby
really no difference

My idea was to convert to FAT32 first, and then to grow the
partitions. But apparently Windows won't allow that.3) Make sure your data is backed up on some other dive!!

Better yet, make sure your data is backed up on another drive that's
reliable. Problem is, how do you determine that a drive is not
reliable, when you have no reliable tools to determine this? One of
the drives in question (the 2GB third drive) was until recently
installed in another computer, where it gave me an "imminent failure"
warning every bootup for four months. After moving it to the present
(much newer) system, that warning has never once appeared, althoug the
same warning mechanism is enabled for the drive.

4) Only have one drive in the computer. This saves the possibility of
mistakes that can occur while looking over all the different partitions.

Perhaps, but it makes installation of alternate OSs more risky. It
also makes it harder to protect data from corruption if the OS goes
south.

Let us know what you find with Knoppix.

See my reply above. Knoppix had no trouble accessing the first, third,
and fourth hard drives, but couldn't figure out the filesystem on the
second (formatted LBA FAT32). QTParted appears able (or at least
willing) to grow the primary partition on the first disk, and I may
give this a try after saving everything on the drive elsewhere.

Of course, if things go wrong, I've got to install Windows again. This
is more of a pain than one would expect, because the Win98SE startup
disk is unable to recognize my LG4040B CD/DVD drive with its Oak
driver, and so I have to install it using an old external quad SCSI
CD-ROM.

 

[Roger Johansson]

Just my Windows98SE installation and stuff accumulated on the Desktop

I think the best solution is to delete all partitions on the C drive, so
it becomes just one partition for the whole disk, and make it use
vfat32LBA, set it as active, then reinstall win98se.

Use QTParted and Ranish to do it.

If you need to use use fdisk make sure you use a modern version from a
win98se boot disk, not an old dos fdisk version.

When you have installed win98se you can use the freeware savepart to
backup the C drive, so you won't have to reinstall windows again.

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

I think the best solution is to delete all partitions on the C drive, so
it becomes just one partition for the whole disk, and make it use
vfat32LBA, set it as active, then reinstall win98se.

Use QTParted and Ranish to do it.

If you need to use use fdisk make sure you use a modern version from a
win98se boot disk, not an old dos fdisk version.

You may have put your finger on it there. I did run DOS Fdisk from an
old floppy made under Windows 95B. I assumed it would support Fat32
fully. Maybe not....

When you have installed win98se you can use the freeware savepart to
backup the C drive, so you won't have to reinstall windows again.

Savepart runs under DOS? That would be nice....

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

[Roger Johansson]

Savepart runs under DOS? That would be nice....

Yes it does. I use a bootable floppy disk based on FreeDOS and run this
program from it to backup my C drive regularly.

This allows me to restore the C drive an earlier situation if there is a
virus attack or some other problem.

http://www.partition-saving.com/

"Partition Saving is a DOS program that is used to save, restore and
copy hard-drive, partitions, floppy disk and DOS devices.

With this program you could save all data on a partition to a file (such
as you could save this file on a CD for example). Then if something goes
wrong, you can completely restore the partition from the backup file.
You no longer have to reinstall every piece of software from scratch.
All you have to do is restore the partition from the backup file and
then update any software that was modified since the backup was
created."

 

[Wayne D]

..

Sorry, I guess I wasn't clear enough in my post. I meant that I had
already deleted both the logical and the extended partitions on the
target disk with Dos Fdisk, and when I then ran Presizer, it warned me
not to continue because the extended partition was "missing or
damaged". So there was no data to lose.

When I had only the primary and the extended partitions on the disk,
Presizer would let me shring the extended partition down to 1MB at the
boundary of the existing primary dos partition, but it wouldn't let me
shrink it in the other direction. There was nothing in the space
occupied by the extended partition, since I had just deleted the
logical partition, and the extended, and recreated the extended, since
Presizer insisted on it. Whatever I did, I couldn't grow the primary
partition to fill the remaining 1GB of the disk.

Hello


Reerhaps, but it makes installation of alternate OSs more risky. It
also makes it harder to protect data from corruption if the OS goes
south.

I didn't make my self clear . I meant to only have one drive in the
computer while you are running partition programs. You may have as many
hard drives in your computer afterwards but only one when you are tying
to figure out what is going on with your hard drive.

____________


FDisk has been updated for larger hard drives. Download from here.

"Updated fdisk for Windows 98 bootdisks and/or systems for hard drives
over 64 gig | Alt1 | Alt2"

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

_____________________


I would first format any drive completely and then start to partition it
the way I want to.

Hard drive manufactures have downloadable programs that you can use to
set up your hard drive the way you want to.

Here is a page with some links on it.

http://www.computercraft.com/docs/evstools.shtml


Other links to Boot disk are: Watch the wraps:

http://www.madboot.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&r
eq=viewsdownload&sid=6

http://www.madboot.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/ubd.htm

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/menu2.htm

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/disk.htm Hints on drive partitioning

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4019.html < Ultimate Boot CD 2.21.
Has every tool on this CD that you will need!!

_________________________________

Let us know how you make out.

Regards

Wayne D

 

[dszady]

Achim Nolcken Lohse wrote:

I saved this post from Roger J. on how to use Partition Saving
It has really come in handy.

Message-ID: <[email protected]>

I just tried restoring the C:\ drive from a Partition Saving image.
It worked, and it was very fast, 3-5 minutes.
That is the same speed as Drive Image in restoring an image.

To make it easier for others to use Partition Saving without reading long
text files I can give some easy directions:

Get the program: http://www.partition-saving.com

Make a bootable floppy disk, either from some dos system or windows.
savepart.exe is very small, just 215kB, but you may have to remove some
file to make place for it on a windows rescue disk.
Or you can put it alone on a floppy and load it after loading a bootable
floppy disk. I put the two other small files on the floppy too, drvpart.sys
and Allocxms.com, just in case savepart has some use for them.

Reboot into the floppy disk and start savepart.exe.

In all these screens, use tab, arrow keys, and enter to navigate. You may
need to use the US-american keyboard layout to write file names, if your
boot floppy does not set your country keyboard correctly.

First screen: Choose save an element. It means save a partition, a disk, or
another part of a disk.

Second screen: Choose disk number, usually zero for the first hard disk in
your system, where your C: drive is.

Third screen: Choose partition to save. In the third column it gives you
the real names, choose C:

Fourth screen: What do you want to save?
Choose "occupied sectors". No use in saving unused parts of the partition.

Fifth screen: Choose a filename to save to. Use D:\saved.par for example.
Use a partition you know has enough space for the file.

Sixth screen: Choose maximum size of the saved file. This is probably a
safety measure in case something would go wrong. Default is 2GB and you can
use that unless you think the file will be bigger than that.
Maybe it is better to choose a lower value based on your own estimates.

The size of the saved file will be approximately half of the used part of
your C: drive. In my case 800MB resulted in a 390MB file with compression
level 1.

Seventh screen: Choose level to deflate, choose level 1

Now the copying starts, and you see a screen showing the progress and a
time estimate of how long it will take, BUT this screen is very misleading
in its estimates, both the time and the progress bar show what would happen
if the partition was absolutely full, and if the whole maximum size of the
saved file was to be used.

So the process will stop a lot faster than one is lead to believe, and it
looks like only a part of the process has been completed.
Don't worry though, it has done what you told it to do when it says the
copying is ended.
Look at the center of the screen close to the top, where it say "running"
as long as the copying is going on, and it says "ended" when it has ended
the copying process.

Choose to not let it create a bat file if you like, and reboot into your
normal windows operatingsystem.

Check out the created file, it should have half around the size of the
content of your C: drive.

Restoring is even simpler, just start savepart from the boot floppy again
and choose to restore an element.
In the next screen choose the file you saved, either by writing its name
including path, or looking for it and use enter to choose it.
Push the OK button.

Next screen, choose what partition to restore it to.
This is, of course, the critical choice. Make a mistake here and you will
wipe out all the content of another partition, so be careful here.
But the display is easy to read and you should have no problem choosing the
C: drive.

Also this time the predicted times and the progress bar are giving the
impression that it will take a long time, but it took only a few minutes
for my 800MB C: drive to be restored.

All in all, this freeware program is very good and easy to use.
I have hesitated to try it out for a long time because the documentation
text files are not fully clear on how to use it.

Together with the Ranish partition manager this program is one of the most
useful and essential partition saving and restoring tools.

I republish here below my review of 3 partition saving programs, to get it
all in one text:
......

Partition saving to an image file is very useful for backup purposes.
Most useful for partitions with a content of up to 4GB.
Big storage disks can take very long to save or restore.

Restoring an image overwrites the chosen partition with the content of the
image file. These programs can save only the used parts of a partition and
can resize the image to fit on a smaller or larger partition, as long as
there is space enough for the content.

_Norton Ghost (ver6 or 2003)_
Payware

Speed: 70MB/minute, and the speed seems to be very constant, no matter if
you use a slow or fast computer, or choose no compression or fast
compression.
The speed seems to depend only on the speed of the hard disk.

Explorer: Very good explorer functions. You can view, delete, add and
change files in the image file. Good search and sort features.

_Drive Image (ver5)_
Payware

Speed: Faster than Ghost, maybe 140MB/minute, with no compression or low
compression.

Explorer: Less good than Ghost. You can view the content and restore any
file to its original location or any other location, but not add or change
anything in the image file. Difficult to find files in big directories as
there are no find or sort features.

_Savepart, Partition Saving V 2.80_
Freeware: http://www.partition-saving.com
Copyright (c) 1999-2003 D. Guibouret

Speed: When I tried with compression level 1 it was very fast, similar to
DI and a lot faster than Ghost.
The resulting partition image file has exactly the right size, the same as
the ghost file for the same partition. So I think the saving was done
correctly. (I restored it later and it was good)

I think the reports I have heard about it being very slow is the result of
less well chosen parameters. You need to choose to save only used sectors,
and choose compression level 1, which gives 50% reduction in size, the same
as the optimal compression in DI and Ghost.
A slow computer makes the saving time longer.

Partition Saving has a good visual interface, you choose what to save,
where to save it, what compression level to use, on a series of visual
screens. The user interface is good and similar in all these programs.
I found Partition Saving easy to use, but you need a little basic knowledge
about partitions in your computer. That is needed for all these programs.

Explorer: No explorer functions at all.
I talked about this with the author via email and he is maybe thinking
about adding such functions

I saved a partition image of my C:\ drive, 800MB used.
It took 3 minutes in PS, similar time in DI, and 10 minutes in Ghost.

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

...

I didn't make my self clear . I meant to only have one drive in the
computer while you are running partition programs. You may have as many
hard drives in your computer afterwards but only one when you are tying
to figure out what is going on with your hard drive.

____________


FDisk has been updated for larger hard drives. Download from here.

"Updated fdisk for Windows 98 bootdisks and/or systems for hard drives
over 64 gig | Alt1 | Alt2"

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

What's the difference between the 98SE and the 98SC versions?
_____________________

I would first format any drive completely and then start to partition it
the way I want to.

Hard drive manufactures have downloadable programs that you can use to
set up your hard drive the way you want to.

Here is a page with some links on it.

http://www.computercraft.com/docs/evstools.shtml

Thanks. Downloaded a bunch of Western Digital diagnostics. As it
happens I just bought two used 8GB WDC drives, of which one promptly
disappeard from my system after creating a primary partition with
FDisk on it, while the other reports as unpartitioned, but won't let
me create one because there's "no space available".

Other links to Boot disk are: Watch the wraps:

http://www.madboot.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index&r
eq=viewsdownload&sid=6

http://www.madboot.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Downloads&file=index

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/ubd.htm

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/menu2.htm

http://www.startdisk.com/Web1/ubd/disk.htm Hints on drive partitioning

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4019.html < Ultimate Boot CD 2.21.
Has every tool on this CD that you will need!!
Thanks will have a look later.
_________________________________

Let us know how you make out.

Will do, but it might be awhile ....

 

[Achim Nolcken Lohse]

Yes it does. I use a bootable floppy disk based on FreeDOS and run this
program from it to backup my C drive regularly.

This allows me to restore the C drive an earlier situation if there is a
virus attack or some other problem.

http://www.partition-saving.com/

"Partition Saving is a DOS program that is used to save, restore and
copy hard-drive, partitions, floppy disk and DOS devices.

With this program you could save all data on a partition to a file (such
as you could save this file on a CD for example). Then if something goes
wrong, you can completely restore the partition from the backup file.
You no longer have to reinstall every piece of software from scratch.
All you have to do is restore the partition from the backup file and
then update any software that was modified since the backup was
created."

Thanks, I went there and downloaded everything is site. Looks like the
documentation is quite a heavy read though. I don't know if it would
work for me though, because I need to save the contents of my C: drive
which is currently a 500MB partition and restore it to a partition
that's three or four times larger.

I also have a second problem in that I run two of my largest space
hogs, Pegasus Mail and Free Agent, from the D: drive. The author seems
to suggest that could be a problem when restoring....

 

[Roger Johansson]

Thanks, I went there and downloaded everything is site. Looks like the
documentation is quite a heavy read though. I don't know if it would
work for me though, because I need to save the contents of my C: drive
which is currently a 500MB partition and restore it to a partition
that's three or four times larger.

That is no problem for Partition Saving, it can restore as long as there
is enough space on the restore disk.

You should use it to save only the used sectors on your C: partition.
Then you can restore the C: partition on the same hard disk or on
another if you change the hard disk.
Use the first level of compression in savepart and your 500MB C:
partition will be stored as a 250MB file.

I also have a second problem in that I run two of my largest space
hogs, Pegasus Mail and Free Agent, from the D: drive. The author seems
to suggest that could be a problem when restoring....

If they are on the D: drive they will not be affected when you use
savepart on the C: drive.