asked on

Fat32

My question is, what are the compatibility issues concerning Fat32 (OSR2)? I recently
bought a 5.1gig WD hard drive and I reloaded the new drive from scratch using Fat32. I am
fairly convinced that after a few days of running the 'new' system, some of my files were
overwritten (intelimouse ver. 2 software disappeared, video became unstable). It would
seem to me that Fat32 and something on my computer are not co-operating.... is this
possible?
I run various virus scanners (thunderbyte, norton, and f-prot); I use Cleansweep3 as
well as FirstAid; I have a flatbed scanner that uses a single chip scsi card as it's interface;
I have a LiteOn IDE cdrom player; I use a Matrox Mystique video card. I made sure that
none of the 'int13' boxes were checked off in the device manager's properties for each
applicable piece of hardware. What gives??
Why is Fat32 unstable on my machine (intel pentium 166 mmx - sb chipset (not ultra dma
is possible with this chipset)? I am missing something in the setup of osr2 & fat32?
Also, if anyone knows a decent web site for this issue could you please let me know...
Thanks,
Pup

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

rmarotta

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Otta

From the MS Knowledge Base:

Last reviewed: May 1, 1997
Article ID: Q148821
95 WINDOWS kbhw

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Windows 95

SYMPTOMS

After you perform one of the following
actions, the contents of some Enhanced IDE
(EIDE) hard disks may not seem to be correct:

Choosing "Restart the computer in MS-DOS
mode" from the Shut Down menu.
Starting an MS-DOS-based program that is
configured to run in MS-DOS mode.

Specifically, if there are multiple
partitions on a large EIDE hard disk, the
extended partitions (usually drive letters
D and higher) seem to contain the contents
of the primary partition (usually drive
C), or to be corrupted.

WARNING: In this situation, attempts to
use disk-repair utilities such as ScanDisk
to repair the apparent corruption will
cause data corruption on the primary
partition of the affected drive.

Any action that attempts to write data to
the extended partitions when this symptom
is observed may also result in data corruption.

Running the CHKDSK command when this
symptom is observed may result in a
"Probable non-DOS disk" message.

CAUSE

This situation is known to occur only when
all of the following conditions exist:

The hard disk is a large (>504 MB)
Enhanced IDE hard disk.
The hard disk is accessed using Logical
Block Addressing (LBA).
The hard disk has been partitioned into
multiple partitions with the Windows 95 version of FDISK, or another partitioning
utility that creates MS-DOS extended
partition types 0x0E and 0x0F.
The system BIOS supports INT13 extensions
to access hard disk devices.
You have exited to MS-DOS mode from
Windows 95 without rebooting the computer.

pup

ASKER

good lawd,,,, i think that's it.... that sounds like my problem....... thank you!!