However... it does in fact sound like the nukage of the first disk was
caused by the driver installer program. God knows what unholy bits it
scribbled on the disk. NT certainly had no part in destroying the disk -
it was an innocent bystander that had its legs shot out from under it.
Actually, when I do repartitionings, I *unplug* the power and SCSI (or
IDE) cable from the drive I don't want clobbered, just in case I do
something stupid.
I will freely admit that I've never found the NT emergency repair disks
to be of much help. And fdisk is brain-dead. Its favorite game to play
woth me is, "I can't delete this extended partition because it contains
a logical volume... but I can't delete the logical volume because there
are no logical volumes." I grab "fips" off the web when fdisk won't work
for me.
When I need to install DOS (with DOS upgrade disks, which is what it
sounds like Joe had), I let the setup disks boot, then hit F3 to get a
dos shell, then run fdisk and format /s as appropriate. Then I boot
again and let it upgrade.
Of course, I have more than enough horrific stories about Unix
partitioning. Surely someone on this list has mounted an overlapping set
of partitions because they read the wrong line in /etc/disktab? And
didn't realize it until they started getting massive file corruption?
(Let's see, c is the whole disk, a and b are contiguous, and g is the
remainder... or is it h?) And God help you if /etc/disktab doesn't
reflect the hard-coded constants in the driver you're running... People
forget just how insanely awful Unix can be just because they're used to
it.
(Why do I blow up so many machines? Because I'm an OS hack who is always
building and booting new kernels or drivers or file systems...)
At any rate, in the future, feel free to give me a call before things
get out of hand.
- Joe
Joseph S. Barrera III (joebar@microsoft.com)
http://research.microsoft.com/~joebar
Phone, Office: (415) 778-8227; Cellular: (415) 601-3719; Home: (415)
588-4801