Hard drive - bad clusters?
 

Hi!

I'm actually setting up a windows system on another computer, but I'm using Tom's Linux Book Disk to set up the partitions and stuff.. want to install Win98

Ok, it's a 12gb hard drive. Nothing on it. Used to be stuff, though.

I boot up, with disk,

fdisk /dev/hda1

new partition
defaults

t - changed to "c" - Win95 (LBA)

then wrote it

started up with win98 boot disk .
enabled cd rom support
then it says it needs to format c: for windows. it does.

then reboot, then

it gives me a screen saying there is bad cluster OR an LBA (logical block addressing) problem.

I tried scanning and stuff.. gave me bad clusters.. but the HD is fine.. so I think it is an LBA problem..

what to do? :confused:

thanks!

I think you should be using win98 version of fdisk to create the partition, however I believe win98 uses FAT32 and not Win95 (LBA).

Second, when you used the fdisk command you used /dev/hda1
that should just be /dev/hda

Ah, I did try that with a Win 98 boot disk. Same thing kinda. I created a primary DOS partition. Then format in the Win 98 setup. But then bad cluster OR LBA thing. Argh!

the hda1 thing may have been a mistake though

Is your motherboard automagically detecting the hard drive? It sounds like the geometry is not being reported correctly for win98 to be able to deal with it (i.e. 1024+ cylinders or something like that)

the hard drive used to have linux on it, and it worked fine.

the 1024 limit thing did appear, and I have seen a message displaying that.

thanks for you help so far.

Well I'm not sure exactly what's going on there, but I think it is the 1024 cylinder thing. I'd check bios and see if you can get it to autoconfig and try again.

in bios it says

primary master

mode
LBA(Y)
NORMAL
LARGE

which do I pick?

-> ok I did LBA (again)

and went to fdisk (DOS)... and created primary DOS partition (one - all space)

then booted from win98cdrom... and it's formatting now. we'll see.

Ah, excellent!! Thanks!! That worked..

Windows is installing.

Maybe I shouldn't be that happy, after all :)

Cool glad you got it going.. Oh wait, maybe I should say that's cool either! Hee Hee!!