RS> You basically leave out crucial information. You havent actually said
RS> explicitly what you have done about LBA support with the new drive.

It is certainly enabled now, and I don't think it was ever not-enabled,
but I'm not sure about that, I may have tried it disabled for some
reason, I was doing a hell of a lot of things.

PE> 1. I've managed to install Warp.  Not really sure
PE> why it is happy to install now, and not before.

RS> Basically the usual problem with OS/2, bullet proof its never been.

It's a heap of shit.  I don't know of anything else that's better
though.

PE> All I can see is that I've reorganized the disks, putting
PE> my corrupt disk as the slave of the second ide controller.

RS> The big difference this time around is that presumably the new drive was
RS> always with LBA enabled, FDISKed like that, and OS/2 installed like that.

Well it didn't install on the new disk, but what happened was I was
able to install on my old 540 meg D drive.  Something which I had
not been able to do before, not even when I didn't have the 2.5
gig disk active!  Perhaps that was it, it was actually doing LBA on
both the 540 meg and the 2.5 gig drive, and it was getting upset
about both.  I don't recall if I tried booting the C drive with
NO secondary.

PE> 2. Warp's fdisk gives me an error saying
PE> "disk 4's partition may be corrupt".

RS> Presumably that valid given you stuffed it and lost the data.

I don't see how I could stuff the partition table.  BTW, on the
2.5 gig disk, I had 3 partitions.  The data on the first and
last was not corrupted.  They were 500 meg and 33 meg partitions
respectively.  The 33 meg only had half a dozen directories 
though, with no files in them.  I put them there for a different
reason.

PE> 3. Warp won't let me install on my new drive E, which
PE> is now the first logical partition on the 3rd IDE drive.
PE> The size of the partition is 1900 meg.

RS> As usual, you dont say what 'wont let me' actually means,
RS> whether it just refuses to do that, or trys to and fails.

When I go into fdisk, there is no option "set installable".

RS> I'd remove the original 2.5GB drive and see if that makes
RS> any difference. You may well be able to add it again once
RS> you get things installed properly on the new 2.5GB drive.

Ok, I'll give it a go.

RS> Thats what I meant about using the same geometry numbers as you had
RS> with the old motherboard. Looks like either you didnt, or your stuffing
RS> around with LBA has caused a glitch on a drive which was initially
RS> installed without LBA enabled, and things are now rather stuffed.

PE> Should I attempt to delete the 1897 and create a 1900
PE> partition instead, to see if that gets my data back?

RS> You havent said how crucial the data is, presumably very
RS> if you bought a new drive. You certainly dont want to go
RS> thrashing around like that if the data is vital.

Well, there is no harm in having an extra 2.5 gig for $445 anyway,
although I certainly would have preferred not to have to spend
the money.  So I thought it was worth doing to let me get back on
my feet, and giving me time to figure out what to do about the
data on the drive.

As for how critical the data is, I am not particularly organized,
but I am a little bit organized.  So as far as I know, all the
REALLY crucial stuff is backed up, and I've restored it.  
However, I won't actually know that until I come across something
that I need that turns out to be not backed up.

PE> I am beginning to think that something has gone seriously wrong with LBA!

RS> Nope, just you thrashing around. If the data was that vital, you should
RS> have carefully checked that it was still looking good before you started
RS> to write anything to that drive at all, coz, like I said, the act of

Basically, the data was good, and good enough to install 7 OS/2
disks on it.  Then I never saw it again.

RS> enabling LBA on a drive which has been FDISKed etc without that enabled
RS> may well make the data invisible etc. Its probably to late for it now
RS> tho, particularly the CHKDSK you did on it in that state.

Is the HPFS format so vulnerable that it can't recover lost chains?
It's not like CHKDSK spent 3 hours recovering the drive, it basically
did fuck all.  Is there specs around for HPFS?  BFN.  Paul.

[later]

I tried disabling LBA on the 4th drive (corrupt 2.5 gig disk), 
and although I didn't get my corrupt partition back with data,
I did get the first partition on that drive appearing on my
bootmanager menu.  I tried booting off it, to see what would
happen (it should have a 7-disk OS/2 3.0 install on it), but
it said that the partition wasn't formatted.  Considering the
data is still there, and fine, that is just a little untruthful!
@EOT:

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