Question Partition Magic and Drive Image messed up my drives ?

[HardDriveAss]

I'm a Very Old Geek. For many years I happily used PowerQuest's Partition Magic and Drive Image tools, running under DOS 6.22 (or sometimes DR-DOS). They did basic formatting and partitioning of drives for DOS and LINUX. I still use those systems. They are my absolute best choice for backup and restore of hard disks without having an OS other than DOS running, which is my chosen right way of doing that.

I never had any problems until I started using drives of over 40GB capacity. Then, sometimes the program would report that there was a problem with the drive and offer to fix it. I learned never to do this, as the drive would never work properly again!

The stricken drives would seem to format and read and write normally BUT only the first part of the drive would return proper data. Past a certain point, it would be scrambled or unreadable. Assorted clues seemed to indicate the drive geometry table was messed up. I know how to use gparted but never what with or where to overwrite the table.

Then, sometimes, I would find the software would to this without asking me! Same sad result. I selected certain versions of the software that didn't do this unasked.

BUT then the problem started happening without warning as drive sizes got bigger. Now I have a collection of drives 80-250 GB with this curse! I want to use them to set up small test systems and to store complete system backups or historical data. I have never found a way to recover them.

These were later bought out by Symantec. The most recent versions I have are:

Drive Image 6.0 (2002)
Drive Image 5.6 (2004)
Partition Magic 8.05 (2004)

These don't show concurrent date and version numbers, possibly due to Symantec acquiring them.

Has anyone ever heard of this problem, or a pointer to where to find a fix?

Please don't tell me to just buy more drives. I'd still not be able to do my DOS-based backups. And I'd have about a dozen potentially very useful drives cluttering my cabinet drawers.

Thanks to anyone who can help!

 

[TerryLaze]

I never had any problems until I started using drives of over 40 GB capacity.

Are you always using the same PC for this kind of task?!
40Gb sounds like a bios limitation.

Now I have a collection of drives 80-250 GB with this curse! I want to use them to set up small test systems and to store complete system backups or historical data. I have never found a way to recover them.

Do yourself a favor and get a few IDE to SD cards (just type this into whatever platform you buy stuff from), old hard drives are fun but they tend to have bad reliability.
An IDE to SD card is transparent to any system, they don't need any sort of drivers or special bios or anything, you just plug them in and any sd card you put in will just look like a normal ide drive. This also means that if your bios doesn't see large drives correctly it wont see large sd cards either.

 

[BFG-9000]

You can use the drive manufacturer's zero-fill utility to restore the drives back to as-new factory condition. Such small drives will usually still be compatible with their older DOS based bootable toolsets such as Seagate Discwizard or SeaTools for DOS, WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for DOS, IBM or Hitachi Drive Feature Tool, or Maxtor Powermax Diagnostics.

For partitioning and cloning, by now you should probably instead be using Linux-based bootable drive utilities such as Minitool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition, since while the older DOS based ones may still work in most cases, if you look carefully they don't actually report the correct drive sizes for large disks. For example Symantec Ghost versions from before it was based on Drive Image will display nonsensical negative numbers for the end sectors, yet in most cases still successfully clone FAT32, NTFS and EXT2 partitions the underlying MS-DOS 6.22 does not understand (FAT32 was of course not fully supported until MS-DOS 7.1, PC-DOS 7.10, DR-DOS 7.04). For Windows 3 through Win9x no cloning utility is actually required as none of the files are locked except one, so you could simply use File Manager/Windows Explorer from a running Windows to copy io,sys, msdos.sys and command.com over first, followed by everything else except the swapfile. I would not use those old DOS utilities to clone EXT4 from 2008 even though they could probably do it in sector-by-sector mode.

If you are unlucky enough to have a board that translates LBA to over 255 heads then all known versions of DOS will crash once that is reached, unless you can user-define CHS parameters to something less. That of course would mean a disk set up that way wouldn't be readable in other computers unless you could also manually set those there too. Or even the same one if the CMOS is ever cleared (so write them on top of the drive)

 

[fzabkar]

DMDE has a console version for DOS. It is both a disc editor and data recovery tool. If you're familiar with Diskedit from the Norton Utilities (1990s), then you'll like DMDE. If you show us DMDE's Partitions tab, that will help us to see what is going on.

https://dmde.com/

 

[HardDriveAss]

Thank you all for quick replies! fzkabar's reply seems most promising.

=============
fzabkar said:
vvvvv

DMDE has a console version for DOS. It is both a disc editor and data recovery tool. If you're familiar with Diskedit from the Norton Utilities (1990s), then you'll like DMDE. If you show us DMDE's Partitions tab, that will help us to see what is going on.

About DMDE (DM Disk Editor and Data Recovery Software)

DMDE is a powerful disk editing and data recovery tool. For FREE you can recover up to 4000 files from a chosen directory. Leader 2025

dmde.com

^^^^^
I will check out that link, fzkabar. I'll report back after investigating.

I always use these sorts of booting drive tools to avoid problems with parts of operating systems. These days I usually use GPARTED for most simple disk partition activities, but I still would like to recover these drives for incremental backups.

Keeping my boot partitions small (<50BG) lets me back up and recover them after even the worst disasters.
==============
TerryLaze said:

vvvvv

Are you always using the same PC for this kind of task?!
40Gb sounds like a bios limitation.

HardDriveAss said:
Now I have a collection of drives 80-250 GB with this curse! I want to use them to set up small test systems and to store complete system backups or historical data. I have never found a way to recover them.

Do yourself a favor and get a few IDE to SD cards (just type this into whatever platform you buy stuff from), old hard drives are fun but they tend to have bad reliability.

An IDE to SD card is transparent to any system, they don't need any sort of drivers or special bios or anything, you just plug them in and any sd card you put in will just look like a normal ide drive. This also means that if your bios doesn't see large drives correctly it wont see large sd cards either.

^^^^^
TerryLaze: have used many computers and hard drives to do this kind of task. The drives all worked fine until I let the PowerQuest/Symantec software touch them - and even then there was no problem unless they tried to "fix" an unidentified problem. The issue is not the BIOS. These computers have happily used nearly-full drives (for backup and clonng) up to 2TB.
==============
BFG-9000 said:

vvvvv

You can use the drive manufacturer's zero-fill utility to restore the drives back to as-new factory condition. Such small drives will usually still be compatible with their older DOS based bootable toolsets such as Seagate Discwizard or SeaTools for DOS, WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics for DOS, IBM or Hitachi Drive Feature Tool, or Maxtor Powermax Diagnostics.

For partitioning and cloning, by now you should probably instead be using Linux-based bootable drive utilities such as Minitool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition, since while the older DOS based ones may still work in most cases, if you look carefully they don't actually report the correct drive sizes for large disks. For example Symantec Ghost versions from before it was based on Drive Image will display nonsensical negative numbers for the end sectors, yet in most cases still successfully clone FAT32, NTFS and EXT2 partitions the underlying MS-DOS 6.22 does not understand (FAT32 was of course not fully supported until MS-DOS 7.1, PC-DOS 7.10, DR-DOS 7.04). For Windows 3 through Win9x no cloning utility is actually required as none of the files are locked except one, so you could simply use File Manager/Windows Explorer from a running Windows to copy io,sys, msdos.sys and command.com over first, followed by everything else except the swapfile. I would not use those old DOS utilities to clone EXT4 from 2008 even though they could probably do it in sector-by-sector mode.

If you are unlucky enough to have a board that translates LBA to over 255 heads then all known versions of DOS will crash once that is reached, unless you can user-define CHS parameters to something less. That of course would mean a disk set up that way wouldn't be readable in other computers unless you could also manually set those there too. Or even the same one if the CMOS is ever cleared (so write them on top of the drive)

^^^^^
BFG-9000: These modern computers do not use LBA translation. I do not use Windows, NTFS or the like - and almost alayws boot from a DR-DOS boot flopppy. All DOS or ext2/ext2 partitions, which always work just fine for any size drive I've tried. As far as I know DI/PM only use minimal bits of the BIOS. Again, these drives all work just fine until garbling - I hope to find the cause of the problem before trying to cure it.

I don't have every possibly manufacturer disk utility, and most work only with their own drives anyway.

 

[fzabkar]

If I understand correctly, you are booting DOS and Linux on modern computers. Your problem arises when you use PowerQuest's Partition Magic and Drive Image tools.

Which file system are you using for DOS, and is it installed in the first partition? What size is your DOS partition?

 

[HardDriveAss]

fzabkar: The problem occurs when I have used PartitionMagic or DriveImage on drives over 40MB. I use them booted from DR-DOS or MS-DOS 6.22.

I have downloaded DMDE for Linux-64 and am studying it. Unfortunately is describes itself only as a file recovery tool, and I am not trying to recover files - just fix the disks. (No files were lost in testing the disks.) DMDE's instructions say it will not work on drives not functioning properly. It points to a product (MultiDrive) that can zero out or restore capacity of problem drives. BUT that runs only on Windows!

If I can't get anything to work I may try E-mailing Dmitry. I wish I could find some mention of this PartitionMagic/DriveImage bug or someone who worked on it!

 

[fzabkar]

https://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/

As I understand it, MultiDrive restores the full native capacity of a drive whose capacity has been reduced by a HPA (Host Protected Area). That is not your problem.

Could we see DMDE's Partitions tab? That will enable us to better understand your drive's layout. DMDE is both a data recovery tool and a disk editor.

Edit:

HDD Capacity Restore Tool restores the full native capacity, not MultiDrive.

AIUI, MS-DOS 6.22 can address a FAT16 partition with a maximum size of 2GB. Win98 DOS should be able to access FAT32 volumes.