[Coco] PC Xp related

[Chuck Youse]

On Sat, 2008-07-19 at 07:54 -0700, Derek wrote:
> On your DOS disk there should be a file called chkdsk. Boot to a: and type chkdsk c:
> 
> 
> 
> You can also use chkdsk c:/auto to try and fix data corruption errors
> and I believe chkdsk c: /surface will do a scan for physical errors on the hard drive and
> then display them for you.
> 
> If you run this and it says that it can not find C: then from your MS-DOS disk you can type sys c:. This will re-write the MS-DOS boot file on the hard drive and can give you access to your drive via DOS at least so you can back up data before doing an XP re-install. If it still will not see the drive then you are most likely looking at a having to delete and recreate the partition using Fdisk and then re-formating the drive.
> 
> 

The reason he can't access his hard drive is because DOS won't assign a
logical drive (e.g. 'C:') to partitions that aren't FAT16.  FAT32 and
NTFS (the filesystems used by Windows XP) have different partition
types.  Therefore DOS ignores them, and there IS no drive C:.

Therefore neither 'chkdsk' nor 'sys' will work.  At best, you can
repartition the drive, format it, and run a surface scan on the
partition.  Or get a third-party tool/write a tool that either uses BIOS
vector 13H or direct access to the IDE registers to perform the needed
diagnostics.  

C.