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Date:	Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:49:49 -0700
From:	"John H. Lindsay" <jlindsay@kingston.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Contemplating violence -- disk problems

Content Type: text/plain

Hi Folks:

I have had and still have a series of problems with disks
3 and 4 on my system, and I am wondering which of several
drastic courses of action to take. I have rejected out-of-
hand using a shotgun on the box.

The culprit:
Motherboard: MS-K8N4-F-MSI K8N NEO4-F S389 (nForce4 AMD64)
ATA card: Promise ULTRA/133 TX2
Video card: ATI Radeon Saphire X550L
HDD1: WD 160 GB
HDD2 & 3: Seagate 40 GB
HDD4: WD 40 GB
2 CD's
2 GB memory.
If anyone wants, I can send camera snapshots of the BIOS
options screens.

Q1. I seem to remember a thread about trouble with nVIDEA
or nForce hardware on one of the lists; I probably have it
from archiving the significant messages in an old WXP
Thunderbird inbox, but until I can really sort out this
system, can anyone point me to newsgroup or SCOUG mailing
list archives where I can chase this ?

I'm beginning to think that the mainboard may be an
underspecified cheapie; as do a number of current mother-
boards, it only supports one floppy, and while the BIOS
indicates on boot that it has the capability of supporting
8 disks, there seems to be no way to attach more than 4.

Q2. Can anyone point me to a source of information about
attaching more than 2 disks to a motherboard ?

Try as we might, my favourite tech and I were not able to
get anything working on a second ATA 133 card (we tested
both ATA 133's separately on another machine and found no
problems with them). I had tried to have all 4 disks as
masters without slaves on the mainboard and ATA 133 #1,
and the CD's &c. on ATA 133 #2. This was to reduce both
disk access arm and data channel contention between the OS
disk, the swap file disk, the application program disk
(compilers, macro systems, utilities, ...) and the data
disk (development source code, temporary files, ...).

Then I had HDD1 on mainboard IDE1 master (no slave)
HDD2 on mainboard IDE2 master (no slave)
HDD3 on ATA 133 IDE1 master
HDD4 on ATA 133 IDE1 slave
CD's on ATA 133 IDE2.

Both WXP Home and DOS reported (using DFSee which gets its
disk configuration information from the OS) that they
saw HDD3 and HDD4 as Disks 1 and 2, and HDD1 and HDD2 as
disks 3 and 4, and WXP complained about various things
about HDD3 and HDD4 and refused to format any of the
partitions on them. DFSee reported no problems with HDD's
3 & 4 nor any partitions on them. Thanks to JvW for insight
here, and I think I'll get back to him with a complete set
of DFSee disk analysis files for a detailed look.

Now I have HDD1 on mainboard IDE1 master
HDD2 on mainboard IDE1 slave
HDD3 on mainboard IDE2 master
HDD4 on mainboard IDE2 slave
CD's on ATA 133 IDE1 (nothing on ATA 133 IDE2).

I tried to install eCS 2.0 RC1 on HDD2, but it complained
about corrupt partition tables on HDD's 3 & 4, and I still
couldn't format them using WXP. I used DFSee to delete all
partitons on them and then recreate the partitions. eCS 2.0
RC1 now would install, and WXP Home did format the partitions;
I made a big partition on Disk 3 NTFS, a smaller partition on
it FAT32, and both a small and a large partition on Disk 4
FAT32.

However, my attempts to format all 4 partitions as HPFS using
eCS RC1 failed. There was no specific message for the
failure; I tried both from the desktop and from the OS/2
command line, and the messages said roughly 'partition failed
to format'. I haven't tried JFS on any of these yet. Again,
I can send snapshots of the process displays and error
messages.

Q3. Can anyone enlighten me on the failure to format ?

Any help here would be appreciated; TIA.

John.

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