Drive geometry errors

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I recently received a new Dell Dimension 8100 system, running W2K, P4, 512 mb, 1 40gb HD. I added my own 45gb as a slave, and all was well until I started getting STOP errors related to IRQs. After reinstalling the OS and all my apps once, at Dell’s insistence, it kept happening. Dell said to do it again. I said no thanks. Instead, I decided to install RC2 on it as an upgrade, since I would have to add in all my apps and tweaks anyway. Everything worked great (even Acrobat Distiller with Office XP!). The XP installation retained my NTFS partition. No more STOP errors (which I traced to an external USB zip drive).

I used the system for many days without any repeat of the STOP errors, but did not like relying on a beta for my business system. So, I used Partition Magic 7 to copy all the critical data partitions from the Dell HD to my slave hd. I then used Drive Image 5 to create images of the Dell partitions on my own hd. I then installed my hd as a slave in my old Compaq. The master drive still had W2000 and all my apps installed. While I could read and copy files from the slave to the master, Partition Magic and Drive image reported drive geometry errors on the slave. Partinfo revealed that either XP, which silently updates all NTFS partitions on all drives to a new version, or the LBA features in the Dell, had seen the slave as a 550 head drive. The Compaq sees it as having 540 heads. The drive images are now useless.

PowerQuest says it is beyond their ability to fix. I’ve returned the Dell 8100, and await the arrival of a workstation 330. PQ say it may see my slave drive as 550 heads again. Neither the Dell nor the Compaq let me choose any BIOS options regarding LBA translation. I can only pick “auto” to configure these large drives.

This is a long story, but it reveals the dangers of transferring large drives between old and new systems. Or, relying for backup on even the latest partitioning/image software designed for XP if drives are being tried out on new systems.

I love WinXP, it seems to correct so many prior problems. The only problem I had was with CD Creator 4 (not compatible with XP). The product activation folks did not give me any hassle on the many reinstalls of Office XP.

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Hi
Odd, really. IRQs as such went out when PCI steering came in around the time of Win 98. Most modern systems use INT#.
If you’re running a dual-boot with Win 2kP and XPP have you thought of retaining FAT32 for all partitons? I triple boot (Win 98SE also included) all on this file system and don’t get any hardware conflicts. (One 40Gb HDD, one 1Gb removable HDD)
Glad you like XP – however, you might not be so pleased when you have to fork out for new versions of many apps (such as your VS). There’s no free upgrade route this time round. Norton can be heard rubbing its corporate hands in the wings…

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Thanks for your advice on Clean Boot and other thoughts. I do not dual boot. Have done so in the past, with a pure DOS, then W98, then W2000. More recently, did so with just W2000 and WinXP. I’ve tried it with dual app installations to different partitions (one for use by each OS) and double installations to the same partition. Also learned to keep pagefile in a separate dedicated partition, and all data in partitions separate from OS and apps.

If the definition of a pessimist is “an optimist with experience”, I qualify. Too many messed up file pointers with dual booting if a utility was allowed to run amock, or other unintended consequences.

Panda antivirus seems to work well with XP and is highly rated. I bought the Titanium version. I wish I could find the paper I wrote the exact STOP error on. It was a string of four words separated by underlines (big help that is!) with one of the words being “IRQ”. I have only two USB ports on the old DeskPro, and three devices, so I use a powered hub by DLink. I discovered that unplugging the hub and the zip drive from the chassis ports stopped the problem in W2000 during bootups. The STOP error would occur shortly after the loading your settings message, before getting to the desktop..

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