MIKE RUSKAI,

25-Oct-99 18:52:00, MIKE RUSKAI wrote to ANDY ROBERTS
 MR> Some senseless babbling from Andy Roberts to All on 10-25-99
          Subject: M$ "screw you" FAT32

 AR>> I need to find out how to permanently get rid of a type "b" FAT32
 AR>> partition created with WIN95 OSR2.  I assume that is similar to a
 AR>> type "F" partition.

 MR> The primary partition table is in the master boot record, which is
 MR> the first sector on the drive.  Since it's very unlikely that this
 MR> FAT32 partition is a logical drive (given the nature of Windows
 MR> and its users), that's probably where the partition will be
 MR> defined.

 MR> The partition table is 64 bytes, beginning with offset 446 (with 0
 MR> being the first byte).  Those 64 bytes are four partition entries
 MR> that are 16 bytes each.  The fifth byte of each entry is the
 MR> partition type.  Changing this byte to a value of 0x07 will make
 MR> OS/2 think it's an HPFS partition (though it'll be completely
 MR> broken, of course, as an HPFS partition).  That should make it
 MR> comfortable enough to delete the entry.

 MR> If it doesn't, then you can zero out all 16 bytes to erase the
 MR> partition manually.

 MR> Needless to say, this requires a sector editor.

I think Norton's diskedit can handle that.

 MR> If you have any programming experience, it can be accomplished with a
 MR> couple DosDevIOCtl() calls (one to read the sector, one to write the
 MR> modified data back), instead.

I quit programming years ago (except for a little REXX).  But I think there
are enough utils around to get the job done anyway.

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