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FDisk, MAXLLF and Format.

O

Oldwolf

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 23, 2004
Messages
437
Hi all.

I'm a bit picky about my system and was wondering:
1. If I do switch over to using SATA drives, can I still low-level the drive using MAXLLF.
2. Can I still Format C: using a 98SE boot floppy?
3. Can I still navigate the SATA drives using a DOS boot floppy if I have to?

Or do I need to have Window up and running, and the SATA drivers activated, in order to browse or do anything to, the drives. Or is it something that's already allowable through the controller chip on SATA motherboards???

Thank you.

PS: I'll never move away from FAT-32 no matter what they tell me. I've had way, way too many problems with NT to ever want to use it.

And Linux(ick) is NOT, nor ever wil be, and option!
 
1. never heard of that tool, so I do not know.
2. depends on the SATA solution used. If you are running a recent motherboard, the on-board controller is often times mapped as an IDE drive for the OS. I can install WinXP without a driver and would expect (key word) that the Win98 boot floppy can see the drives as well.
3. if you can locate dos drivers or 2. is true, yes, otherwise, no.
 
MAXLLF.exe is a dream tool to use. It's the Maxtor low level utility. I've used it on everything from 640mb harddrives to 500Gb drives. And it runs off of a 98SE boot floppy.

All I'm looking for is some sort of assurance that I'm not gonna run into troubles when/if I make the conversion to SATA. I'd like to be able to lowlevel a drive, run FDisk and format a drive from a boot floppy in an emergency. Without having to resort to using Windows if I'm out at a job site.
 
DBAN sounds like it's your speed. You boot from the CD, it wipes the hard drive. Done.

PS: FAT32 is the worst file system I've ever had to use. Except FAT16. And FAT12. What "problems with NT" did you have? Journaling filesystems are way, way more stable in the event of a power failure.

PPS: What's wrong with Linux? If you're a DOS guy (which it sounds like) I'd've thought it'd've been right up your alley. I think that's the most contractions in least words I've ever used. I think it's grammatical...

 
Who or what is a "DBAN"???

I've been around long enough to know way back when(Win3.x/95), when you use to have to load the CD-Rom drivers onto your boot floppy in order for it to be recognized in DOS.

You're just jealous because NT doesn't have a boot floppy, nor can you use one to navigate an NTFS drive. I've searched everywhere including Bootdisk.com, and they don't have one either.

Problems??? Try running Quake 1 on NT 4.0 and you'll see what I mean. And this nonsense of having to go into the Administrative Tools/Computer Management to manually add drives that already exist. Instead of having them automatically appear in My Computer like under 98SE or XP. I could go on and on.

And yes I have XP on FAT-32, how else could I navigate it from a boot floppy? You sure can't do that under NT!

I only use DOS in emergencies like when I have to repair someone else's O/S.

And the word you want is contradictions, not contractions. Unless you're pregnant or something???

Various other people, including myself have had their own troubles with Linux. Everything from hosing during the install, hosing after the install, and just plain bugginess in the way Linux handle itself on AMD systems.

And yes, I was even around during those early days(Redhat 5) when you had to write your own drivers for Linux if you wanted to get something to work right. And in some cases you still do. Take a look at the problems ATi has had in recent years trying to write Linux drivers for their products.

Imho, Linux just ain't worth it, yet.
 
DBAN is software that boots and nukes. See screenshots and download it.

I'm not going to argue with you - but you might check out BartPE for a little more friendly recovery disk for NT.

con·trac·tion: 2a) A word, as won't from will not, or phrase, as o'clock from of the clock, formed by omitting or combining some of the sounds of a longer phrase.

 
NT 5.0 and 5.1 are a lot better than 4.0, but as far as navigating around through DOS, i have no idea.

and technically, xp doesnt use DOS anymore, it is now known as the command prompt and the OS actually runs and DOS is something in the background (no longer running the OS). windows 2000 started this, but still was not that far of a break away from DOS as xp is.

im just curious by what you mean by navigating around through a DOS prompt. i like to learn, maybe curiousity will get the better of me one day...but until then, i'll keep asking questions to things i dont know.
 
While I was an undergrad at a state university I worked on computers. The university switched from using MaxLLF to DBAN for one key reason.

MaxLLF is old and address drives by cylinder-head-sector (CHS)
CHS addresses data by physical location on the drive, but these days CHS doesn't refer to a physical location on the drive... but MaxLLF still does.
If you do the math (you can see it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector#Heads or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector#Tracks )

You will see that this form of addressing has a limit of 8GB.

So if you use MaxLLF to format a 1TB drive, you are only doing a low-level format of the first 8GB. All that other data is still untouched.
It wouldn't take much to read that other data.

DBAN is my favorite free formatting utility, and the university I worked at switched to DBAN as well.
 
Do you realize you just bumped a 5.5 year old conversation? Might want to start a new thread if you have anything you want to discuss. Just an observation. Thanks.
 
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