Unuseable Logical drive

My second machine (made up of bits & pieces left over after many upgades),
PII, 20 Gig HDD, has a problem. This is a totally empty machine, with just
Win Me and a Logitech mouse driver. I used fdisk to partition the hard
drive into a primary partition (C and five logical drives, D:, E:, F:, G:
and H:, (don't ask why, I just like it that way) but when I tried to format
drive D: in DOS, I got a message saying "Invalid media or Track 0 bad. Disk
unusable". All the other partitions formatted without trouble. I installed
Win Me on C: and it runs fine but any activity involving work on the drives
runs very slowly, even if it it doesn't involve drive D: and the drive makes
the little scratchy noises that it made when I was trying to format it.

Weird !!!
I just went and checked and everything now seems to be OK. No scratchy
noises, everything working normally. The supposed unformatted D: drive
accepted a *.txt file, closed and re-opened it. I ran scandisk and it
reported no bad sectors on the surface scan. Most suspicious of all, though
is the appearance of another drive (I in the drive list produced when I
click on My Computer. All its details (size etc) are exactly the same as
those of Drive D:

I've just found a note on the performance page of System Properties that
says drive D: is using MS-DOS compatibility mode filing system, which I
really don't want.

One other thing which may or may not be part of the puzzle: I can run fdisk
from the Windows Run Command but when I try to run "fdisk status" from
Windows I get "Parse Error 9" in the black MS-DOS window.

Any help or explanations would be most gratefully recieved

TIA

Christine Withey

 

'Little scratch sounds' are v.often the sign of a failing hd. Check hd manu
for a checking utility.
PS any point to 6 partitions with a 20gb hd? , equates to about 3gb for each

 

Time for a new drive.

In <>,
Alan and Christine Withey took 35 lines to utter:

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