From: Cottrell, Eric (ecottrell_at_Doble.com)
Date: Mon Sep 14 1998 - 13:58:54 EDT
Hello,
I was at a computer show this past weekend and saw this neat
IBM travelstar 3 Gig HD. I bought it. Now I will have room
to have linux-on-the-go as well as more space for Win95 and OS/2.
It is 9.5 mm high (3 less than the 1 Gig HD I installed previously).
Height is not a problem. There is a problem with the mounting
holes. The mount for the HD are two metal halves that are held
together via the screws that go into the HD casing. The whole
assembly is held in via a tab that a screw goes through. The
drive does fit snug in the assembly so I drilled two holes diagonally
(one in the front and the back). This seemed to keep the unit
held in place when in the laptop but I am going to tape the two
halves together so it can be handled easier if needed. Also
drill and deburr the new holes away from the new drive and
make sure there are no metal filings on the pieces or the
HD.
The bios had no problem with the drive. The major problem is
with the phdisk program. It could not create the save-to-disk
partition without corrupting the partition table. Also with the
partition
present the computer would hang at the point after it checks the HD
and before it checks the floppy so you cannot boot at all! I had to
delete the partition by connecting the drive to another machine.
Doing a Dejanews search showed that this is a problem with > 2 GB HD
even with newer versions of the program. Unfortunately the version
of phdisk on the latest 365 utility disk does not have the option
to make a swap file on the C drive. It has to be a partition.
You can do without the save-to-disk partition but you get a bios
error message about the partition not being there on every bootup
You cannot disable this message even if you do not use safe suspend.
I spent the afternoon trying stuff like reducing the number of
cylinders in the bios. I also tried defining a 27 meg partition toward
the beginning of the disk when I partitioned out the disk then deleting
it
to make a free hole for the program to use (It seems the program ignores
the
in-use space and uses it anyway). All these attempts did not work.
What finally worked was for me to use the OS/2 fdisk program to
partition the disk out with two dos primary partitions (my 1.2 gig
Win95 one and a 27 meg one) and an extended partition. I put the
27 meg partition right after the 1.2 gig dos partition. I then booted
up
linux with the boot disks and used the linux fdisk program to change
the type id on the 27 meg partition to A0 (which I noticed was the
partition type for the save-to-disk partition). When I rebooted there
was a error message that the partition was corrupted and to rerun
phdisk. Running the phdisk program without parameters it said that
the good map table was bad and to reformat. I reformatted and now
it works fine. So it looks like the problem is when phdisk creates a
partition and not when reformatting an existing partition.
I know a 1 gig drive upgrade works. A 2 gig drive upgrade may be
a better choice if it had the same mounting hole pattern and
if phdisk works with 2 gig drives.
I now see if would have been better if I just got a two drive 2.5"
adapter,
used drivecopy to copy over the drives, used partition magic
to resize everything, and reformatted the save-to-disk partition
using phdisk.
73 Eric eac_at_shore.net
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