Just when I thought I was getting ahead. Forgetting the printer for a moment, so if the mods will allow a separate space I'll tidy up to save bandwidth tomorrow...GMT -6
Again, this is just for learning, so only read in if you've some spare time. At least this is a bit more interesting.
Since the installation was c
p, I thought I would practice with partition magic and get them the way that I wanted.
The thing about that program, is it seems to need to do its stuff after reboot. So since the OS is now in the wrong drive, it can't see it a few seconds after the start. How daft is that? Worse still, the drive letters are still wrong, so to get it going I've got to load an OS, then mess with P-M again, then with more care, when I'm sure the drives are where I want them, load the OS yet again.
Several things have come to light. Nothing says that it's showing the drives in the right physical order. Properties divulged the cylinders for me, but nowt in windows or P M actually said which logical drives were in a physical place on the disk. To get the perifery as the boot area, I had to shuttle the letters about. But here's another thing. There was a scrag-end of 7mb lurking on the first cylinder. I spent and hour trying to merge it or lose it or just plain kill it...In the end I left it. Very unprofessional.
So, now I've got a tit-bit, C D E and F G as the opticals.. Okay, but what I really needed was a simple utils disk. Start and F-Disk - format etc., just like the old days. Can anyone recommend such a util. The start of an installation works on a good day, but I had no control over it.
The old recovery disk finally came to life. Funny how you can look at something hitherto useless on the shelf, and just know that it's going to work.
I notice that the sectors are showing 512, is this correct right across the entire range of cylinders? anyone know if they're logical/ virtual sizes, like the first attempts at modern drives.?