6 replies to this topic

[Carolyn]

I just got a Thinkpad A20m with a 20GB hard drive. It had XP on it. I booted with my Win98 startup disk and used Fdisk and wiped the HD. I have not ever installed Win98 over XP before so I was doing research on the net and did the best I could. It had an NTFS partition left on it and as I went thru Fdisk, I thought I gave it instructions to wipe the NTFS partition and reformat it to be ready for 98. I selected yes on something to do with large hard drives. I successfully installed 98, all the drivers and I have it up and running beautifully. Now I notice that the hard drive is only showing up as 9.36 GB of space. It has a 20 GB hard drive. I fear this is because the NTFS partition is still there, and half my hard drive is inaccessible. What can I do to recover the missing 10 gigs of HD space? Do I have to start all over? And if I do, how do I get a clean install of 98 and recover the full 20 gigs of HD space? Thanks a bunch...this is my new toy and I want a pure Win 98 laptop.

[was_jaclaz]

You can delete the NTFS partition and re-create it as FAT32.

I don't think that original FDISK can do that, but you can use the Freeware Ranish Partition Manager to do so:
http://www.ranish.com/part/

You can use the 2.40 version allright.

You will need to start in DOS mode and run the utility, it's use is rather straightforward, but if you are not familiar with partitioning, Primary and Logical Volumes inside Extended, ask here before.

The result will be that of having the disk partitioned in two, one volume will be, for example "System" with OS and all programs and the other will be "Data" with all your data files, by the way having not a just-one-volume-where-to-put-everything is also highly recommended.

FYI, there are a number of Commercial Shareware software capable of resizing your current Win98 partition to span all over the disk, and also a freeware one, FIPS:
http://bmrc.berkeley.../fips/fips.html
but resizing a partition is beside as said not recomended in your case a potential risk of losing the "good" System partition, and definitely for their use some experience/EXTREME carefullness is needed.

jaclaz

[Moon Goon]

I've also seen partition partitions that aren't always modified or deleted properly. I'd consider backing up any important data and doing a low level format. Use DBan.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dban/

A complete wipe makes sure no weird residue is left behind. Sometimes partition managers can get confused by remnants of partitions made with other partition managers. Heck, sometimes a partition will be "cursed" and still somehow effect new partitions even if the old one was deleted. Better to be completely sure you've nothing but 0's when setting up a drive.

[was_jaclaz]

@Moon Goon

Though your suggestion is valid in some cases , it is TOTALLY unneeded to wipe an entire drive even in such cases of difficulties in re-formatting.

All is needed is zeroing the partition table entry corresponding to the old partition, if no non-standard bootmanager is use the (usually 62) hidden sectors after it, the first sectors of the partition, say 100 of them to be on the "safe" side and, only in the case of a NTFS partition formatted by Win2k/XP/2003 or later, the end sector (containing a mirror of the bootsector).

So, since completely wiping an entire partition, given the huge size of modern disks, can take a looong time , it is not needed if not for security/privacy reasons, and even in those cases a single pass is more than enough, the "Guttmann" theory has been "debunked" by the Author himself:
http://www.forensicf...m...065&start=0

jaclaz

[billonious]

Hey Carolyn, if you are to use again win98 floppy disk, try this updated f-disk with no hd size limitation ftp://ftp1.fkkt.uni-lj.si/newfdisk.zip. Link is got from http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

In case you don't want to start all over again, you may also use partition magic (acronis & paragon products do the job too) if you own a copy, to merge the 9,36gb with the lost 10gb of hd. Partition Magic will probably show the lost partition as unformatted or NTFS. Format it to FAT32 and merge it with the visible one (call it C:, where win98 is installed) without loosing data from C:.

[Carolyn]

I cannot sing the praises of Ranish Partition Manager loud enough! I installed it, read the incredibly complicated instructions, which were totally beyond me...decided to just run the program, followed my intuition about what seemed right, and in less than one minute I recovered my lost 18 gigs of NTFS HD space.
Thanks so much for this totally useful advice. This program works beautifully with little understanding of the instructions...just works.
Thanks so much. My Win98 700MHz laptop is up and running.
Carolyn

You can delete the NTFS partition and re-create it as FAT32.

I don't think that original FDISK can do that, but you can use the Freeware Ranish Partition Manager to do so:
http://www.ranish.com/part/

jaclaz

[was_jaclaz]

Only too happy to hear a story of success!


Now, it's time for you (of course if you wish so ) to start reading the MDgX site about all the updates, fixes and betterings you could, and in some cases should, apply to your Windows 98:
http://www.mdgx.com/

jaclaz