Hi Dave,

On 31-Oct-99, Dave Davidson wrote to Ian Moote:

 DD>>> The two drives currently in that machine in question are Segate
 DD>>> 4.3GB and a Western Digital 2.5GB.

 IM>> Be _very_ careful! If you clear the wrong MBR then you're
 IM>> SNAFU'd. I'll also send you another two utilities to save and
 IM>> restore your MBR's in case you accidentally do the wrong one.

 DD> Can ya 'splain the snafu'd part? It's my understanding that if the
 DD> MBR is lost or corrupted, using FDISK with the /MBR switch, would
 DD> re-create it. Is this wrong? Not trying to be a smart a**, I
 DD> really don't know that much about hard drive dynamics.

The partition table is in the MBR together with the boot code.
"FDISK /MBR" (thats the DOS version, for OS/2 its "FDISK /NEWMBR")
only replaces the boot code, and leaves the partition table alone. So
if you inadvertantly clear the wrong MBR you've lost the partitioning
information for the drive. Ian's utilities will save all the
information so that the partition table can be restored if necessary.

 IM>> According to Andy's report, FDisk _isn't_ deleting the
 IM>> partitions. According to him, when you reboot the FAT32 partition
 IM>> is still there. So, is is still there when you reboot?

 DD> Yes. When I run the OS/2 install disks and it gets to FDISK, it
 DD> shows a Type B partition, with the only options available is to
 DD> delete the partition. When I delete it and exit FDISK, the
 DD> partition doesn't appear to be there. However, upon re-booting,
 DD> it's there again.

I've had that problem. I found that it happened when the disk had been
partitioned under one geometry (it was set for translation) and I
changed it (to native geometry) before installing OS/2. I couldn't get
FDISK to clear things - just like your situation.
Solution - I set the geometry back to the one used to initially
partition it, OS/2 FDISK then happily cleared everything down and I
could then change the geometry and OS/2 FDISK then partitioned
everything the way I wanted.

George

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