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From: Paul <
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Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Subject: Re: What is the difference between a regular Format and a Low Level
Format?
Date: Thu, 23 Nov 2017 05:25:41 -0500
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Ian Jackson wrote:
In the past few years, I've collected a load old/ancient disks, and used some of them to 'keep my hand in' doing XP installs on an old clunker
PC. [These never seem to go the same way twice, but that's another story.]
X-GSmartControl (and other tests) shows that quite a lot of these disks
have a few minor historical errors, so I decided that it might be a good idea to do a low-level format on some of them (using HDD LLF Low Level Format Tool). This didn't seem to do any harm to the disks, but on one
type (IIRC, all 160GB Seagate), when I tried to install XP, when it got
to removing the installation disk and rebooting, the reboot came up with
a blue screen showing the message "Unmountable boot volume" (and a lot more). IIRC, three Seagate disks did the exactly the same, but a couple
of others (Maxtor 40GB, I think) were OK.
So is this just a coincidence, or can a low-level format leave at least certain types of hard drives looking apparently OK - but unusable for installing an operating system on?
That sounds like a 48 bit LBA problem (cuts in at >137GB, 120GB
drives OK, 160GB IDE drives could deliver a surprise). That's a problem
on IDE drives, before ATA/ATAPI 6 or so. Seagate offered a document
on the topic, which is a place to start, but not the end of the
story. Some of the pronouncements in here are overly pessimistic.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070121085230/http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/dis c/tp/137gb.pdf
Older IDE hardware, before 2003, supports 28-bit LBA, and that
causes a limitation in practical partition size. If the address
rolls over in hardware, an attempt to write to the 137GB mark,
ends up writing to location zero, wiping out the file
system header or other valuable goods.
After 2003, more BIOS and hardwares were claimed to support
48-bit LBA, which significantly extends the address space.
There was an announcement by one of the motherboard companies,
that all their stuff supported 48-bit on IDE, after a certain
magic date. I think it was 2003, but my memory isn't very good.
The original proposal to the standards body, on how to do this,
is documented here (the year 2004 is the first time Archive.org
took a snapshot). It was a "double-pumping" of some registers,
to cause fewer interface changes or something. On page two, it
shows how an extended set of information, is loaded, via the
pattern in the upper table. That's how they fit 48-bits.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041024150852if_/http://www.t10.org:80/t13/technic al/e00101r6.pdf
I thought the behavior of Windows handled this pretty well.
I'm surprised the boot was a problem. For example, Win2K SP2
won't make a partition larger than 137GB on a 160GB disk,
so it won't get into trouble. (That's because Win2K SP2 can
also corrupt a larger hard drive, given a chance. Win2K SP2
was doing the best job it knew how to do.) But if a second partition
happens to span the 137GB mark, that could easily cause
corruption. You can "import" a drive from a more modern OS,
and have it ruined by Win2K SP2 (SP4 is OK).
x 137GB
<--------------------------><----------------------------------->
Partition below 137GB Partition spanning 137GB = trouble
is OK and works by itself |
|
^ | A write to 137GB, goes down to zero,
+-------------------------------+ corrupting the first partition or MBR
*******
Using another OS drive, boot the system and do your forensics
on the 160GB drives that aren't behaving themselves. It could
be that the OS partition is completely trashed. See if you
can spot the "NTFS" string in the first sector of the
partition for example. A copy of HXD could help, as it has
an option to open a hard drive for low-level access. You will
have to take your best shot at the math to work out where
the partition(s) start and end. I like PTEDIT32 for this
purpose - it's a great help, and it was easily available up
until a year or two ago.
https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/
*******
If you want to "cheat death" and you have the time to spend,
try pre-formatting the 160GB drive. Say, make a 100GB partition
and format it NTFS. Now, put it in the system where you'll be
doing the install. Tell the installer to install in the
100GB partition (not above that). When you boot, it should work.
Don't allow the installer to pick its own size (it indeed, that's
how this mess was caused). Maybe you were using a WinXP Gold year 2002
or so CD ?
Paul
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