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Ranish Partition Manager revived (Announce)

posted by boeckmann, Aachen, Germany, 17.01.2023, 23:11
(edited by boeckmann on 17.01.2023, 23:30)

> b) I have an old DELL laptop, in about built 2009, last bios 2010, that has
> no options to change BIOS settings from UEFI, AHCI etc. back to old
> system. Nevertheless it is able to handle SATA SSDs in FreeDOS, means, I
> can boot from external USB diskette, run ranish and create partitions,
> write a system on the SATA etc.
> The interesting thing is:
> I tested with a 256 GB SATA SSD, created partitions etc, formatted, checked
> surface of SSD, nothing special happened.
> When doing this test with a 1 TB SSD from WD, creating partitions etc.
> works, but when I come to formatting or checking surface, there is a stop
> at 13 percent I get a message "One or more bad sectors found on disk" - OK
> - clicking on OK gives a message "BIOS error code BB".
> Format says: Cluster Stats: 30516378 used. 0 bad, 943 items, 30516379
> last.
> Safe format: have to trash 242.193 used data sectors!
> Mirror map is 1908136 bytes long, 238506 sectors mirrored.
> Warning: Each FAT is 238410 sectors, > 16 MB-64K, Win9x incompatible.
> 100 % completed.
> Optimized initia Root Directory size : 1 clusters.
> Safe Quick format complete.
> 976.762.552,5 kb total disk space
> 976.524.064 kb available on disk
> 32 kb in each allocation unit.
> 30.516.377 allocation units on
> disk.
> After this I tested another 1 TB SSD from Samsung, disk1, 953869 mb,
> partition 1 NO GPT guard partition and ran verify disk surface (v).
> At 13 % verifying I get the following message:
> One or more bad sectors found on disk. OK
> This time: BIOS error code 04.
>
> Forgot to mention: There is no error message at virtualbox 2TB HD.
>
> I am not sure if the two HDs really have a bad sector there.
> The two HDs work fine on the same machine with Linux.
>
> There is another thing that I noticed with a 2 TB HD. dosfsck reports an
> error message with 77 FATs, I could not test it once again at the moment,
> but I assume it is reproducable. But I think this is a dosfsck bug.
I think the disks are fine. 13% of 1TB could be the 137GB 28-bit LBA barrier. If you are interested what it is, the details are explained in this document: https://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pdf

Everything above, 48-bit LBA access is needed. Perhaps there is some incompatibility with the older BIOS and the larger disks regarding that. Perhaps someone here in the forum knows what is going on. I am not deep in this BIOS / ATA related stuff.

You have partitioned the disk with ranish and formatted with FreeDOS format? Have you used LBA partition types? Not sure if FreeDOS makes use of it.

But your problem is a good indicator that I should change the format routines in ranish, such that the last block of the partition is always written to read from?. Then this problem should be detected, even if doing a quick format (which is the default as of yesterday).

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