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Same DSI troubles!!!

S

squirrel-steam

Experienced Member
Joined
May 6, 2007
Messages
87
Location
Michigan, US
I started up the DSI 386 today to see if maybe it will decide to format the hard drive, or see it at all in ms-dos. So I checked the drive perameters in the bios to the drive perameters printed on the hard drive. All match, jumpers are set just fine, but when I go into a ms-dos 6.22 start up disk, it says there is no such thing as a drive called C: on this computer, but when you go into FDISK, it will check the drive integrity, and make partitions on drive C:, sees the exact size of it, but it will not save the partitions. I tried saving the partitions, then doing a warm boot, and a cold boot, nothing. I can't format it either, I try to change the directory from A: to C: so i can format C: (will format the A: drive,) but will not see such drive as C:, interesting though, if you change the directory to B:, it will read the floppy drive originally marked as A:, so i guess I could try a third party disk formating software, does anyone know of one?
 
Well, I'm not sure I follow some of that, especially the part about changing the 'directory' from A: to a non-existent C: in order to format C: ???

What do you mean, you can't save the partition(s)? If you fdisk, set the partitions, ESC,
reboot and run fdisk again, are the partitions not what you set? Most unusual if true.

Is the primary partition active?

If there is only one floppy drive, it is indeed both drive A and drive B.

Good luck,

m
 
BLA

Sorry, i didn't phrase that right, when i type "A:\FORMAT C:," it says "Invalid Drive Perameter," and in FDISK, it will make a primary DOS partition, i will set it active, and when i restart, warm or cold, the partitions just disappear, they are not there.
 
Well, hard disk drive letters refer to partitions, not disks, so until you have a valid partition there is no drive C: to format or do anything with. Can't think of why your partitions would "disappear" though unless there is a hardware problem, but I'd think you'd get some kind of error message if that were the case.

Have you got the manufacturer's diagnostic software? What make/model is it BTW?

Hope someone else has an idea.

m
 
Its a DSI GTBWIN386-6, but the hdd controller is an ISA Acer board, one ide channel, one floppy channel. Many, many jumpers. Perhaps some of those aren't configured properly? I don't think so because the BIOS disk utilities (AMI) will check the disk for errors (no errors,) and format it (wouldn't dare format it with the bios,) and the floppy disks work fine, and its not throwing any errors. I tried resetting the bios, but it keeps a charge for 2-3 hours after the battery or reset jumper is taken out, so i try not to do that to prevent downtime.
 
I don't have any documentation for the computer, or do i have any diagnostics for the hard drive, maybe western digital will have them on their site, but I ran the bad sector test in the AMI bios, it came up with none.
 
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