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From TNPC issue #1.02...
Recipe for Disaster: A Large Hard Drive, Third-party
Partitioning Software, FAT32, Windows 98, and Norton Speed
Diskby Al Gordon
July 17, 1998
A not-so-funny thing happened to me on the way to preparing
an article on how to install Windows 98 while preserving a
Windows 95 installation: I had a catastrophic, unrecoverable
loss of data on the primary partition of my hard drive. Which
is to say my brand spanking new Windows 98 installation was
totally trashed.
Stuff happens in the computer world, including data loss.
But this is the first time I ever experienced it without
hardware failure and without being able to salvage things with
recovery utilities. Worse, some of the principal players in
the drama claim to have no knowledge of the problems.
The particular combination of ingredients necessary for the
problem to occur is: (a) a hard drive larger than 8 GB; (b)
using Partition Magic, or other dynamic partitioning utility,
to create FAT32 partitions; (c) using a multi-boot utility,
such as System Commander, to swap among different operating
systems on separate partitions, and (d) running Norton Speed
Disk to defragment the FAT32 partitions you created with the
partitioning utility.
All that SOUNDS obscure, but actually, it's a fairly likely
combination if you attempt multi-booting, or even if you just
use a partitioning utility to break up a large hard drive into
several partitions. Win98 setup will allow you to save a
backup of your old Win95 setup, but if you want to have your
old Win95 and your new Win98 operating systems working in
parallel, you need to multi-partition. Also, the partitioning
tools included with Win98, such as Fdisk, will erase all data
while a third- party utility like Partition Magic preserves
it.
This experience is the ultimate tech support nightmare: a
data- destroying problem caused by the interaction of separate
programs made by different companies. Inasmuch as the bug
cannot be assigned fairly to any one of the programs,
customers are at the mercy of the companies' willingness to
take the initiative and finding a solution. In this case, that
initiative was in very short supply.
V Communications, which makes System Commander, was on top
of the problem, has a fix, and I am indebted to their tech
support department for patiently walking me through the bug.
The eagle- eyed editor of this newsletter, Dan Butler, finally
helped pinpoint the key to the problem: unknown to most
computer users, Microsoft has devised more than one type of
FAT32 formatting: a standard version and "FAT32X," which was
invented to get around the technical limitations of current
generation PCs when using hard drives larger than 8 GB. (It
looks as though FAT32X may simply be a coined term, and not a
new feature or variant of the FAT32 file allocation scheme
itself. Early reports indicate the term "FAT32X" might be
slang for capabilities of FAT32 to which partitioning and
other hard drive utility developers hadn't paid attention
until more people started using drives larger than 8 GB. Stay
tuned. -- Ed.)
To make a very long story short, the current version of
Partition Magic does not support FAT32X, and for some reason,
Speed Disk will rearrange the contents of a standard FAT32
partition on a large hard drive into FAT32X format. As noted,
V Communications knew of the problem when I called their
technical support department, and has a fix. PowerQuest
(Partition Magic) knows about FAT32X, but hadn't been aware of
the problem with Speed Disk until I called it to their
attention. They are developing a version 4.0 of Partition
Magic that will support FAT32X.
However, as this is a written, Symantec has yet to
acknowledge a problem with Speed Disk. Microsoft, whose format
this is, has nothing about FAT32X in their Knowledge Base, nor
was the Microsoft technical support person I contacted able to
provide any information about it.
At this point, there appear to be only two fixes: first,
stop using Speed Disk and instead run Win98's Disk
Defragmenter utility, which doesn't cause the problem. Or,
alternatively, install the "4.01 Maintenance Release" of V
Communications' System Commander Deluxe, which has revised
partitioning routines intended to avoid this problem. (System
Commander 3.x, the multi- boot-only utility, does not include
this capability.) Upgrading to Partition Magic 4.0 when it
becomes available is another option, of course.
Given the potential for catastrophic data loss, the uneven
(to be charitable) response from the tech support shops
involved is unacceptable and disturbing. V Communications
didn't get its information out of thin air, if they knew about
the problem, why didn't everyone else?
FAT32 is a new technology that is married in Win98 to some
of the old DOS-based technology, which is being outrun by
modern hardware. In the issues ahead, we will be looking at
some of the problems that may crop up as the old and new
technologies collide. 
Copyright © 1999, PRIME Consulting Group, Inc.
and Dan Butler. All Rights Reserved.
The Naked PC is a
trademark of PRIME Consulting Group, Inc.
ISSN: 1522-4422
You may reprint an article from TNPC as long as you show
the entire article and include the authors byline, excerpt and
subscription information as shown:
Recipe for Disaster: A
Large Hard Drive, Third-party Partitioning Software, FAT32,
Windows 98, and Norton Speed Disk
by Al
Gordon
(This article originally appeared in The Naked PC
newsletter #1.02, subscribe at
http://www.TheNakedPC.com)
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