Roy J. Tellason,

25-Oct-99 17:34:53, Roy J. Tellason wrote to Andy Roberts
 RJT> Andy Roberts wrote in a message to All:
          Subject: M$ "screw you" FAT32

 AR>> Personally I'm a little surprised that Seagate's Low Level Format
 AR>> prgm for IDE drives did not solve the problem.

 RJT> So am I.

 AR>> OTOH I'm not doing the work, and my friend is not near by, and he
 AR>> may be re-installing Win98 every time before he tries to install
 AR>> OS/2, thus re-creating the problem all over again.

 RJT> Or otherwise not operating the program correctly.

He said it took about 1-1/2 hours to run the Seagate Low Level Format on the
2GB IDE, so I assumed he had the right thing.

After that I told him to send me the drives and I'd fix them here.

 AR>> This situation has been going on for several years, but he did
 AR>> tell me he went through the Low Level Format this last week end.

 RJT> I've only ever had one set of problems with a partition table
 RJT> here, and that was because I made the mistake of letting an
 RJT> AHA-1520 do the translation thing.  This caused some very odd
 RJT> behavior when I switched to the (current) 2842, and only a
 RJT> low-level format seemed to fix the problem

I think JdeBP's OS2CLU02 PartList /Fix might have repaired that for you.

OTOH I have a pile of SCSI drives here and I have changed controllers from
the 2842A to the 2940 without any problem.  I was careful to make sure my
translation setup was the same on both controllers.  Every new SCSI HD gets
the Adaptec Low Level Format immediately before any data.  And old HDs get
Adaptec Low Level Format as soon as I can backup the old data when I put in
the new controller.  Reading from 1 controller to the other doesn't seem to
be a problem.  I just don't trust writing until a Low Level Format is done.
So far the only SCSI HD problem I've had was a combination of a new faster HD
and an old Adaptec BIOS or chipset, both of which were replaced for free.

 AR>> At this point I'll do almost anything to solve this problem and
 AR>> stop this annoying repetitive complaining about OS/2 installation
 AR>> not flushing the M$ toilet.

 RJT> Heh.  Interesting choice of phrase, there.

I try to avoid 4 letter words when talking about M$ in public. 

 AR>> I would appreciate any suggestions in detail that I can forward
 AR>> to him to do.

 RJT> I will be looking forward to seeing other responses you get to
 RJT> this.  So far, I haven't run into the problem myself, but any
 RJT> software that puts _zeros_ in that first sector of the disk,
 RJT> without regard for partitions or filesystems or anything else
 RJT> oughta do it.  I *think* I remember seeing somebody post a debug
 RJT> script that would do the trick, though I can't be sure

I vaguely remember something about that.  I hope they repost the details.

 RJT> I'd want to know from somebody with this complaint _in detail_
 RJT> the steps they were taking, there's probably some assumption
 RJT> that's messing things up in the details, somewhere.

I tried the best I could to state the facts gathered from his 10 steps to
frustration, that obviously failed at step 3 when FDISK could not find any
free space on his HD.  I talked to him about an hour on the phone LD while he
went through the FDISK thing, which resulted in info that he had over looked
such as the type "b" FAT32 partition taking up all the space and coming back
again after every attempt to delete it.  I don't think re-posting his original
msg is of any use, since he tends to write the results after he is frustrated
and almost always says he's gone back to Win98.  I'm inclined to assume he
gets some of the steps out of sequence, and probably went back to Win98 before
he even started to install OS/2.  So the Low Level Format gets trashed before
OS/2 has a chance to use any of the HD.  If he sends me his drives, then I'll
find out for sure.

 RJT> You never can tell with these win-users

I've learned that some of them are addicted to the M$ virus.  And they don't
really want a cure.  So what they say has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Personally I find it easier to accept the M$ users who are forced into using
it without a choice due to their job.  Some of the M$ users who stick with M$
and don't concern them selves with any other OS don't make any waves either.
It's the M$ users who want to blame IBM or Linux or anyone other than M$ for
the problems that are created by M$ that tend to irritate me.  Normally I just
ignore them.  But in this case I've known this fellow for a long time and we
have other interests in common to be friends about.

     Thanks and Good Luck,        Andy Roberts
                                  andy@shentel.net
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