"Dan_Musicant" wrote in message
On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 22:21:12 +0100, "Folkert Rienstra" wrote:

That may be a result of lack of 48bit LBA
support in the bios, just affecting formatting.

Yeah, that must be it. Obviously it miraculously formatted itself before
he had this crash, or maybe the bios downgraded itself afterwards.

I probably formatted it with Partition Magic 7.0. The fact that I
couldn't format my 40 GB FAT32 partition seems to be the result
of Windows format not supporting more than 32 GB for FAT32.
Unfortunately, the Windows didn't make that clear and it seems to me
very very stupid of MS.
Anyway, I had no trouble making the drive OK now with Partition Magic.

A Seagate support guy warned me yesterday to steer away from
Partition Magic, but it looks like it's either that or be satisfied with
32 GB FAT32 partitions, so I did it anyway.

It's the first such warning I've gotten, and I suspect his motives in
offering that info.

That depends on how safe Partition Magic is.
If it partitions without checking whether those partitions will actually be safe
to use under the OS in question with the driver's capabilities than he has a point.
Unfortunately the same situation can exist with Fdisk if the BIOS supports
48-bit LBA but the OS drivers do not.

As for the formatting capabilies of PM I can see a few niggles there too,
eg if it doesn't do a surface check (just a quick format).


Thanks all for the help.