Dan Butler's
TNPC Newsletter

Recipe for Disaster: A Large Hard Drive, Third-party Partitioning Software, FAT32, Windows 98, and Norton Speed Disk

by Al Gordon

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.