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Primary partition needed on 2:nd disk?

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  • Hard Drives
  • Partition
  • Storage
Last response: in Storage
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April 8, 2003 8:59:09 PM

If I have two hard disks do I then need a primary partition on the 2:nd disk?
Background. I have two hard disks. The first one with one primary partition and one extended. C:, D:
The second disk I would like to only have one extended partition (with one logical) E:
My question arises after the second hard disks partition table has been corrupted several times. I have also tried another hard disk with the same problem.
I am using Windows 98SE with FAT32 on that computer.
The partition failure occurs when I copy files to it. I am investigating if it happends after a certain amount of GBytes. I have been copying by marking all files in Explorer, I have also used xcopy and I have tried just copying a few Gbytes at a time.
The first disk is a 100 GByte disk and the second disk is a 80 GByte disk. Both running on the same IDE-channel with a ATA100 cable.

More about : primary partition needed disk

April 9, 2003 2:20:02 AM

Once the partition table has been read by the system/operating system it should not need to be touched again as, in this case, the FAT table would not be held in the same area as the partition table. If the partition table is being corupted, you may want to see if you got some form of boot sector virus.

Using a primary partition on the second drive would cause the second drive to become the D: drive as this is the standard way that DOS through windows98 and maybe ME mounted drives. If it does alleviate the problems then I would think it's a small inconvience.

GK

Yes, I made it past newbie w00t.
April 12, 2003 1:29:59 PM

According to Microsoft it is okay on the second disk to only have an extended partition with logical drives in it.
I have tried different, obvious, things to try to find the cause for the error.

I now know that the partition error occurs when passing 32 GB.
The last changes/tests is done after:
I have updated BIOS.
I have updated fdisk
I have tried to use one primary- and one extended partition.

Now, I will try to se what happends when I use gdisk instead of fdisk.
If that fails I will move the disk from the first to the second IDE channel.
If also that fails I might decide to partiton the disk with smaller logical drives :-(
!