China DOS Union

My computer’s hard disk is 20G total. Under WINDOWS there are 4 drives, C D E F (all in FAT32 format). C is the system drive (with about 1.08G free left), and F has about 876MB free left.

I used the “Tomato Garden XP installation disc” to boot from the CD-ROM and chose “WIN98 startup” to enter DOS. Under DOS, drives C D E can all normally show the files on them, but when I type F：\ to enter my F drive, it shows only
attrib.exe
chkdsk.exe and 15 other files
15file(s) 594,217bytes
0 dir(s) 1487,872bytes free
information. (Among them, when I search under WINDOWS, attrib.exe and chkdsk.exe are files in C:\WINDOWS\system32.) I also tried other drive letters, but still could not find the F drive I see under WINDOWS! I don’t know why. How can I solve this?
I also tried the method “try typing G:, H:, I:, etc.”, but still couldn’t solve the problem! By the way, before I installed Longzu XPSP2 Universal GHOST, the current F drive was originally D, the current D drive was originally E, and the current E drive was originally F. C did not change. Before installing Longzu XPSP2 Universal GHOST, when I used the DOS boot floppy made by the method on this forum to enter DOS, typing drive D entered the original E drive (that is, the current D drive), typing drive E entered the original F drive (that is, the current E drive), C did not change, and the original D drive (that is, the current F drive) also could not be entered. From beginning to end, all 4 drives C D E F have all been in FAT32 format.

[ Last edited by adslceo on 2005-11-27 at 15:10 ]

Judging from your Screen03.gif, your hard drive really does have 4 partitions (1:1, 1:2, 1:3, and the top one is 1:4), but the volume label of your fourth partition is in Chinese, and this is exactly the partition that is not visible under DOS. Could it be that you hid this partition? The F: drive you are seeing is actually MS-RAMDRIVE (that is, a virtual RAM drive). You should know that Ghost8.2's disk ordering is very scientific.

My hard drive is similar to yours (it's a dual-boot system, with Windows98 installed in the first partition and WindowsXP installed in the second partition). When booting from 98, on the surface it looks like there are four drives CDEF (where C: contains Win98 and F: contains WinXP), but when booting WinXP, although they are also C:, D:, E:, F:, C: is WinXP and F: is Win98). Ghost doesn't care about your CDEF drive letters; it only arranges things according to partition order. In Ghost, my Win98 is in the first partition, WinXP is in the second partition, while D: is the third partition and E: is the fourth partition.

to adslceo:
You should have a drive letter confusion problem.
From “Disk Management.JPG” it looks like you have two primary partitions. You probably once used a dual-primary-partition setup for a dual system, right?

to chujiafu:
A hidden partition can be seen in Disk Management, it just won't be shown in “My Computer”, as in the picture: (notice “New Volume”)

Originally posted by 220110 at 2005-11-27 07:38 PM:
to chujiafu:
A hidden partition can be seen in 磁砮..

What I meant by hidden was not the “Nodrives” hiding in the Windows system registry, but that the left 8 bits of the 4th byte in the hard disk partition table (that is, the high 4 bits) are not 0H, but 1H.

However, adslceo's hard drive really does have two primary partitions.

“...the left 8 bits of the 4th byte in the hard disk partition table (that is, the high 4 bits) are not 0H, but 1H.”
I used SPFDISK to hide a partition, and used DEBUG to read out those 64 bytes of partition table information. I did not find any such high 4 bits set to 1H.

I have never heard of this kind of technique for hiding a partition through the partition table. I only know that the entire hard disk can be hidden by modifying the MBR. Please forgive my incomplete knowledge; hard disk technology is just too difficult, so I don't dare mess with it casually. Asking for advice

Re adslceo:

Judging from the color bars in the partition graphics in screenshots 1 and 2, C and F are indeed two independent primary partitions. The C partition is located at the beginning of the hard disk, and the F partition is located at the end of the hard disk; screenshots 3, 4, and 5 further confirm this indirectly.

The situation of dual primary partitions does not appear only in dual-system setups (and many dual-system setups have only one primary partition). It also appears frequently in environments using system backup software based on Ghost or other partition backup software as the core (for example, one-click restore type software). In this situation, the backup software will usually choose the last partition of the hard disk (or carve out one or two partitions from the remaining space at the end of the hard disk) to store the system image files, and this partition is usually a primary partition (so it can be used under DOS). It is usually not activated and is hidden. When a backup is needed, the boot-layer module of the backup software will activate the backup partition and enter the DOS environment from that partition.

Re willsort:
According to what you said, if I put DOS application software on the F drive, then after entering DOS how should I enter the F drive? Many thanks! Or what software can I use to repair my F drive so that it becomes like D and E (change it from a primary partition into a logical drive?)