Windows Forum

Ask something
Discussion Locked

LBA harddrive help needed

0 helpful
10 replies

by oz_media

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Ok, some dude screwed up a ladies computer and now the anchor is on my floor as usual.

It is an OLD PC AMDK6, just a few sticks of miniscule RAM (48MB total or something), tiny HD, and several basic PCI cards, graphics, network, sound, USB.

Now I noticed after reformatting and starting a WIN98 install, the scan came up with the LBA warning and won't perform a surface scan without a zillion failed blocks. From what I understand, LBA was an older technology used to recognoze larger hard drives using the 48 bit file system.

Does ANYONE have experience here? I'm sure it's a common A+ thing, how do I get scan disk and suface check around this? If it is a smaller drive do I still need to use LBA? Can it be changed and how/where?

Thanks for any help you can offer.
OM

10 replies

by thechas

Hi Oz,

48 bit LBA is actually part of how Windows 2000 and XP deal with drives larger than 137GB.

On these older motherboards, there are several options for how the drive is configured in BIOS settings.

Some drives need to be set to LBA mode to be properly recognized.
Most however should NOT be set to use LBA mode.

Now, here is the rub. If you change the mode in BIOS settings, you will need to start over from scratch. Starting with fdisk.

Chas

by cg it

48 bit Logical Block Addressing I believe is for huge drives like large than 137GB.

When you install W98 and it wants to do a scandisk, you can skip the surface scan.

If scandisk reports a godzillion bad sectors [not surface scan] I would opt for a utility a little more robust in trying to recover bad sectors.

TheChas might have some neat tricks up his sleeve for this. I probably would run Norton Disk Doctor and see what's up. Might opt for Partition Magic and see what it has to say about the drive. Then try a FAT32 format making the entire drive the C partition. Then run scandisk again see what it reports and still skip the surface scan.

by oz_media

Skipping surface scan:
I actually tried to skip th esurface scan and just like the files scan it said it needed to complete in order for setup to continue.

Is there a switch I can use when running setup?

As for other disk utilities, it's a no go. I am not into formattnig and installing some app in DOS mode from a bunch of floppies. i'll buy her a enw PC myself before doing that.

Can I just run an FDISK and partition it as 32Bit, format, install Win98 and be done with it?

Do you have any idea why such an old drive (small) would be LBA formatted? if it is not a major performance issue I will happily convert it to FAT32.

I don't think the user knows, she is older and just gets the odd email etc. It was pased to her from someone else as usual and had all thier crap that she wanted removed. the first guy to lok at it has watched me format a few and install various WIN flavours, he then undertook this as he thought he would help her out. I really wish he didn't, I hate this old stuff!!!! ARRRGH!

by sgt_shultz

...and here are those win 98/95/me setup switches you asked for:
/iq - If you use the /is switch to bypass ScanDisk or if ScanDisk does not complete successfully, Setup checks your drive for cross-linked files. The /iq switch prevents Setup from doing this.
/is - This switch causes Setup not to run ScanDisk.
I can't find mention of lba errors during setup in mskb. you have my sympathy. my 2 cents: win98 will run like a dog. can you put win95 on it instead?
and, you did try turning off/on lba support in bios, yes?

by oz_media

Thanks for all your help guys, as usual it's about as good as it can get.

I have figured it out thanks to you. I found poser wires running behind the mobo and the secondary ribbon disppeared too (big old tower). FDISK showed a single partition and bios was just a mess. I pulled the rear plate of the mobo to find two tiny quantum drives stuffed between the mobo and the outer cover.

Removing them ?!? let me get a single drive formatted and reinstalled. I caled to ask about the other drives and she had only ever seen one drive letter in Explorer. I don't know if someone was trying to add space at one time and used old Unix drives or something and it didn't work? I am comletely baffled, what a wierd situation.

Oh well, it seems OK now and she says the drive size sounds right, She said it was a big drive, over 2 gigs! The others were really small, perhaps old DOS drives or something? 750MB?

This discussion is closed to new replies.