messed up partition table reinstalling windows 98

[Alex Janssen]

das said the following on 05/01/2007 12:42 AM:
> On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 23:29 -0400, Alex Janssen wrote:
>   
>> You don't need any helper sofware.  MSDOS and Windows 98 have all the 
>> facilities to install themselves. 
>>     
>
> No, they don't. I don't know if it has ever happened to you or not.
> Quite a few times I have seen the Partition tables get messed up. Some
> power cut during partitioning or defragment, some serious voltage
> fluctuation, trying to create NTFS partition, and, in many cases,
> without any definite reason. Both in MSW-only and dual-boot or
> multi-boot machines, I had quite a lot of experience of this order.
> Particularly for our local linux group I installed linux (SuSE, Slack,
> Mandrake of that time, and obviously Ubuntu for the last one year or so)
> in a lot of machines, and handled quite a few of them. So many times I
> have seen that MSW cannot handle problems cooked up by itself. From its
> Fdisk if you delete the non-dos in the extended one, it says it does,
> but actually it does not, and misreports the disk-space. Or, problems
> like that. In MSW-ME and MSW-98 it was quite a common problem. Situation
> became a bit better in MSW-XP and 2000. Don't know what it is in Vista.
> And, curiouser is the thing that I have seen Linux fdisk running in
> 'rescue' mode succeed in every occasion. I just delete all of them,
> create a new VFAT and exit and then, MSW installers can handle it very
> well. I partition this VFAT into MSW's FAT-32 and start installing. 
>
> Due to this big difference in our experience, it seems there maybe a HW
> factor there. I am talking about a economically backward district of a
> third world perspective, usually low RPM low cost HD-s, processors and
> all, with HW that are in no way up and coming: absolutely different
> order of experience from a lot my friends in the West. And this may lead
> to our differences in experience. 
>
> ---
> das 
>
>
>   
You hit the nail on the head in the beginning of your message.  Power 
fluctuations and outages do cause a lot of if not almost all disk 
problems.  You can not have the power go off during critial operations, 
which includes all writes to disk.  That is why I always include an 
un-interruptible power supply with every desktop I install.  I consider 
it a necessity, not an option.  Get one from a reliable company that has 
an equipment protection warranty.  Not to advertise, and I'm sure there 
are many good brands, but I use APC brand.  All types of problems 
disappeared when I started using them in 1996.  You must protect every 
connection to your computer that might allow a route for an AC power 
supply or weather related surge.  Battery backup is really only 
necessary for the cpu that has disk storage attached.

HTH,
Alex

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