CompuServe Messages

Jerry, I've been holding your message about your hard drive system partition not validating, hoping someone else would answer. I used to work on drives a lot, but have done little with them in the past year or so, so I'm a bit rusty about dealing with such problems, and have not looked at the disk structure in 2.04. In earlier versions of the system, and I suspect it has not changed that much, there is a single byte in the root block that can be changed with a disk editor and which will then permit you to work on the disk. This has to be done with a disk editor, and if you don't know what you are doing, it can cause even more serious problems than you already have, so I hesitate to go into detail if anyone else can help you. I'm puzzled, however, that you say your status shows that your drive IS validating. Sometimes, if your drive is in a rather bad state, validation can take a very long time. Have you let it keep going until the drive light goes out? If it will validate itself, even though it might take several minutes, it is far better than trying to write to a specific byte on the disk with an editor. —Betty