the quantity of starts means something...? well fdisk shows a lot more, but i not care before about how many are idd.

and about letters, it only giveme A: for HDD, and B: C: (accesing the disks). D: is invalid unit letter.

weird....

Yes, it shows more but as explained it will only be useful as fat16 is used.
You still continue with not using A,W,I because this is the only way to get more than 32 MB , the rubbish you get is probably due formatting wihtout partiontable
The ****** means indeed that you can access 6 letters IF YOU HAVE COPIED THE FILES MSXDOS2.SYS AND COMMAND2.COM !

now i do this

A, W, I

then D, and set as disable all the partitions except the four first.....

THEN W

then i Quit, and reset....

i runs to fdisk again because still returns non DOS error...

and option D, it shows that all disabled partition are intact (start/lenght/ attrib), all intact, but the four first are destroyed with junk.... (that means, anyting ramdonly start/lenght/type/attribs)...

so, then (i thinks no, it is not possible)

i press R, re-read option, and D again

each time that i do that, i gets differents partition information , corrupting more and more the normal data....

that is very weird... so, next step, i will try with another little hdd...

Could there possibly be a jumper on your HD, or is there a tool from it's manufacturer, allowing you to switch from CHS to LBA ot LARGE mode. If so, experementing with which mode is correctly supported in your combination of IDE+HDD might be worth the efforts.

IIRC the last thing you have to do before closing FDISK is actually WRITE the partition information, so if you want to safe all your changes the 'W' should be the last command you use. I usually start FDISK /FAT16, auto-create a partitiontable, delete all but one FAT12 partitions and make FAT16 partitions out of the rest of the diskspace. I hope this works for you as well...

To flyguille:
Connecting hardware, updating flash, partitioning and formating are really not the easyest things to do. It is anyway worth of the work. Once you have done it, you don't have to worry anymore. The tools are not best possible, but as soon as you have this done, you will be able to see the new world of MSX-DOS2 :-)

I hope you best luck. Maybe we will soon see a HDD support in NMBIOS :-9

Still forgetting to copy the dosfiles.
Snout donot worry, I gave him the drive so, and it is very clear how the jumpersettings have to be and how long is you flatcable 46cm,75 cm or longer ...

well, now i am using SCANDISK utility to test the HDD, in unpartitioning mode...

it is running, also i will try to copy all the files again from the original sunrise disk to my 5 1/4 disk, maybe some file was corrupted, but corrupted without returning no one error?... that wondersme....

Sunrise: I think the lesson here is that the harddrive should have been prepartitioned ^_^ Perhaps something for the next time No worries flyguille, we will not rest until your harddisk is fully operational

Quote:

Still forgetting to copy the dosfiles. Snout donot worry, I gave him the drive so, and it is very clear how the jumpersettings have to be and how long is you flatcable 46cm,75 cm or longer ...

is long like 1m

ok, looking for one short....

i am booting DOS 2.2... from the disk

how to copy that to the HDD? if when i does partitions , in BASIC it returns disk i/o error

wait, chaging the flatcable now

Hmm... One (unlikely, but possible) possibility can be also errors in data bus. If you have CD-ROM, disconnect it, and set your HD as master. (CD-ROM used to cause me read/write errors)

My current HDD also only seems to work with old flash bios version. (1.98 if I remember correctly), but that is caused because my HDD is VERY old, so this should not be your problem.

incredibe, all the problem was just the flatcable....

by 50cm extra?

the flatcable that i uses before works fine in a PC , i use it to connect a CD-ROM to the pcs of my cyberCafe to install games....

amazing

thanks guys....

to take in account with a flatcable of exactly 90cm it not works...

surelly too much noice

As I have also had problems with signal in cable, maybe someone could look, what is wrong with the hardware design. Is there some easy way to get better signal trough? (changeing resistors etc.)

I see real action in this thread !

Snout , in this case maybe it would have been wise. But Sunrise never delivers harddisk with the ide's

To flyguille :

Does i/o error occur after doing files"a:?
Since the a drive has no information on it it seems logic

But I repeat
If you have done A,W,I reset the computer.
find the diskdrive as said I suppose it is f or g

Donot ask files

Do
Copy"f: msxdos2.sys"to"a:
and also command2.com the same way
If it is not the driveletter f it must be g:
reset and it had to work

But I definately know now it is or was the flatcable