200GB - Vanishing and Corrupt Partitions

[Shrub]

I bought a new hard disk today, a Samsung SP2014 200GB but I'm having a load of problems with it.

First of all, none of the patched versions of FDisk could see the drive properly. The only FDisk program I could find that was close is one that supports up to 180GB. I figured, seeing that it's only supposed to be a cosmetic thing that this would work properly. I made the primary/boot partition 20GB's big (thinking it would clear up the 180-200 overlap), and made 5 logical drives in the secondary partition - 10GB, 20GB, 30GB, 65GB, and 55GB (or there abouts - was relying on percentages do to fdisk's limitations).

These partitions seemed to work - they formatted alright, though the 65GB one did show up as something like 3.14GB while formatting from dos, but, after installing Windows 98, it appeared fine, however, one of the partitions had no size attributes under Windows, so I formatted it thinking I had missed it out during dos format.

I started copying files from my secondary 80GB drive to the partitions on the new drive and initially everything that I copied ran fine from the new disk. Then, I noticed one of the unused partitions was filled with corrupted filenames - so I reformatted that too.
I rebooted the PC after copying just about everything from the 80GB disk, but when I got back to the desktop top all of the new drive's partitions apart from the primary - C and the first logical - D had vanished.

Does anyone know what's going on here? Is the drive faulty or is FDisk to blame for corrupted partition tables or something?

 

[RichPLS]

Let Windows format and partition the drive... During installation it will prompt you to create a partition and format.

Also, partitioning up a drive is so passé. Just use it as one partition, and if you must, just one should be enough.

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And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[Shrub]

I'm using Windows 98SE which only uses up to 137GB per partition or something, besides, I need a few different partitions.
I've sort of got it working now. I put my 40GB drive back in and am using the new drive as a secondary - partitioned into 3rds with Partition Magic.
I think the problem I had originally was tha I had the primary parition at 20GB and the secondary at 180GB. The secondary partition being too large for 98 to handle - even with logical subpartitions

 

[Shrub]

Problems have started up again. The last partition of the drive became corrupted and Partition Magic couldn't entirely delete and write zeros to it.
Is it to do with Windows 98? What's the maximum size it can handle?

 

[sturm]

I am assuming this is an older computer?
Whats your power supply wattage?
You might want to look into upgrading to XP if your going to use hard drives that big. Heck xp couldnt handle more than 137gb at first so I seriously dought 98se will work either.
You might try putting each drive on its own cable and also might try a different cable also.

 

[Shrub]

Athlon M 2600 system, motherboard is a terrible Jetway one but I don't think it has any BIOS problems when it comes to harddisks. I'm wary about using XP's filesystem - I've had problems decryption before so I'd rather stick with Fat32.
Tried the drive both as a master and a slave, neither worked alright. The drive appears to have bad sectors at the end - Partition Magic failed to complete it's delete and write zeros function.
I'm sending the disk back tommorrow, gonna see if I can exchange it for a Seagate 120GB.

 

[pat]

You can always use FAT file system wth XP, but well, I've been using NTFS since I got XP and I'll never go back to FAT... Simply more stable and less prone to error.. No more checkdisk at startup in case of reset..

And you dont have to specify a password with xp, so no encryption problem ...

(\__/)
(=<font color=red><b>˚</b></font color=red>.'=)
(")ώ(") This is my bunny..terminator!!!

 

[Shrub]

ohhhhh, I always thought with NTFS that everything was automatically encrypted. I'll look into it. Thanks.