Hi, On Tuesday 18 May 2010 19:59 (CEST), Marcos Favero Florence de Barros wrote: > - Problem 1: Partitioning and formatting in FAT16 > > I simply have been unable to partition a 4 GB or 6 GB disk in > FAT16 and get it to work properly. I tried it in countless > ways, using FDisk and Format (both from FreeDOS), and > TestDisk.
Simple: FAT16 doesn't support partitions bigger than 2GiB. So, you have to choose: - either you are sticking to FAT32 - or you use only 2GiB partitions (for eg. 2 or 3 partitions on the drive, with each one having 2GiB max.) Personally, I would go the FAT32 way, as it results in smaller clusters (and therefore the disk space is not wasted that much). > - Problem 3: Getting rid of "illegal" folders and files First of all, I think it would help if you could define what an "illegal" file exactly is from your point of view... If you end up with files having weird names, you could try to use a disk editor to rename them... (Norton Diskedit is great for that) Also, I would advise you to run a badblocks analasis. badblocks will tell you wether you have a hardware problem or not. If your drives have broken hardware, then trying to fix their filesystems using any possible tool is pointless. > Is it safe to work with the computer while there are a few > illegal folders and files in the disk? In other words, is it > possible that the mere presence of some illegals would > confuse the system and cause the appearance of other > illegals, or somehow crash the system? No, it is definetely not safe. Having a broken filesystem may lead to loss of data. > Is there a procedure to erase everything from a hard disk and > start partitioning and formatting from scratch, so that > programs do not complain that some end marker is missing or > the contents of some sector are implausible? Basically, removing all existing partitions from within FDISK should be enough. If you really want to erase completely the disk, you might perform a cat /dev/nul > /dev/sda from within a Linux session (where sda would obviously be your disk device) Also, there are tools out there, like DBAN (www.dban.org) which may help you erasing your hard drive without any actual linux knowledge. ;) Best regards, Mateusz -- You'll find my public OpenPGP key at http://www.viste-family.net/mateusz/pub_key
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