by HEEELLLPPPP! I am sending this message out to all of the groups
I belong to because I am on the verge of tears. I have been up
for the last decade (at least it seems) and I'm ready for the
nuse.
I have this hardrive. It is 261MB big. I had os2, linux, and dos
all running on it. However, I bought this other hardrive. It is
a 40MB IDE. Of course, I decided to pop it in and give it a shot
without reading the docs. Of course, my computer froze. Finally,
I got the jumpers changed to have the drive running as a slave. So
I put it back in and wow! it worked. But something was phishy. In
os2 boot manager, I couldn't get more than a 40 mb partition on drive
1 (261MB) to show as able to put into boot manager. But on the 40 mb
drive 2, I could get any size partition I wanted, to show up in the
menu as available to be placed into boot manager. Well, I went along
with it. I partitioned my drive 1 and it said C:, D:, E:. I partitioned
drive 2 and it said F: and G:. The f and g were 20 mb apiece. Then
I set C: installable and booted up dos. Great! Dos said that I had
two drives, d and e, that I chose for dos and should be formatted. So
I formatted them. I went through the whole installation. Great! I went
to dos, typed f: and nothing! It said it wasn't recognizable. O.K. So
I typed D: and dir. It said D: was 20MB. Same with E:. It seems that
dos formatted drive 2 and skipped drive 1's partitions. Well, no prob
I said. I'll go into linux fdisk and play around. But here is where
I knew something was wrong. Linux said it could not read the hardrive.
What! So I figured maybe the repartitioning did something and I should
format. So I ran a format from my hardware utils supplied by NEC. Linux
still could not read the drive. Well, not true. It read the first 40mb,
where dos was, but nothing else. I tried removing the new drive. Still,
it was not recognizable. I am going to cry. I think I just destroyed my
harddrive. Please tell me I didn't. Please tell me that it is the first
installation of Linux and its file format that is causing the problem.
Please tell me there is a way. I called IBM to ask why boot manager was
not letting me choose these partitions as installable and the guy (not
a specialist because it is the weekend) said he had never heard of such
a problem. Ahhhh!!!!!!!!! I tried calling the IBM 900 number but it is
broken at the moment. I called Seagate but they just have faxes. I
would get the fax over my faxmodem, but I can't use my computer! Please
tell me someone out there can help me. I know that alot of people
have been able to help in the past with software and hardware problems.
Please come to my rescue again. I will forever be indebted to you.
Thanks!
P.S. I am sorry for taking up so much bandwith with my individual
problems. But please look at this message as my one phone call from
jail. It is my last hope to get help. Please!!!!