D: maybe just FAT
win98 can not see the old FAT its a 16
Xp read all!

"Steven Saunderson" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 30 May 2010 16:23:01 -0700, Andrew
wrote:

Thanks a lot for your interesting comments and helpful ideas.
I'm sorry to bother you again with my questions, hopefully last time, but
this might lead to a breakthrough.

It's not a bother but I'm sure you will be rather irked if your system
gets trashed due to my suggestions. If you want to see the details of
your disk layout can you download and run PartInfo.exe. It is a DOS
program and you can redirect the output to a file (e.g. "partinfo
my.lst").

You mentioned changing the boot indicator (00 or 80). Why not just
leave both your primary partitions as type 0x0C and change the boot
indicator when you want to change from XP to 98 or vice versa ? This is
how I do it and the only complication in your case would be if PM has
changed your MBR code. This is unlikely but I honestly don't know.

To resize my WinXP(* partition located in the following sequence of
partitions: [C: Win98, (* WinXP, D:, E:, Unallocated] by 7GB, PM had to
go
through 5 'elementary' steps in the order displayed below:
a. Resize Extended (* by 7GB (taken from Unallocated)
b. Move E: up by 7GB
c. Move D: up by 7GB
d. Resize Extended (* down by 7GB
e. Resize WinXP (* by 7GB

The overlapping copies in steps b and c could be risky but I'm sure that
PM is doing them carefully so there is no data loss if a crash (e.g.
power loss) occurs. Step d sounds a bit risky because the LBA keys in
the EPBRs are relative to the extended partition. Step d would involve
changing each EPBR and then updating the MBR and I'm not sure how PM
could recover from a crash in this short step.

Are these details somehow useful for confirmation of your idea about
these
strange values?

An authoritative reference for FAT32 is an MS document called
FATGEN103.PDF which should be easy to find. "Hidden sectors" is
generally the offset of the volume from the sector containing its
partition entry. So, for primary partitions it is the absolute key and
for logical partitions it is 63. But, I've seen exceptions and the
volumes are still accessible so maybe the value isn't used.

You mentioned a high "first cluster of root" after you'd resized E:.
This suggests that PM has created new directory records and switched
over to these lists once the data copying was complete.

Expanding your E: volume could have been a major task for PM. E: was
just under 8GB which means it could have 4kB clusters. When you
increase it to over about 8.3GB the cluster size has to be increased or
the cluster count will be too high for utilities such as DeFrag. How PM
can do this safely is beyond me.

I still haven't answered your question about D: being inaccessible in
Win98. Can you setup your disk so D: is inaccessible and then run
PartInfo to get the list ? One other source of info here is the MSFN
forums (search for Win98 IO.SYS).

Cheers,
--
Steven