China DOS Union

Last time I accidentally got a very old small hard disk (only 80MB), and it only had MS-DOS 6.20 on it. Now I also have an MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk that is not afraid of “logical locks”, so I was going to try booting into DOS with it and see whether I could use software like NDD2002 to directly repair the “logical lock” on the hard disk.

After putting the “logical lock” on the hard disk, I used this latest MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk (at this point that May 16 version “Super MS-DOS 7.10 Boot Disk” could not boot) and very smoothly booted to A:\, but of course drive C was already gone at that point. I first ran FDISK.EXE and SPFDISK.EXE on drive A, but they reported an error in the hard disk partition. So I then ran NDD.EXE on drive A to start NDD2002, preparing to repair drive C.

After selecting “Diagnose disk” from the NDD main menu, NDD reported errors on the hard disk and asked whether to repair them. I selected “Yes” a total of three times (and I had selected the “Undo” function), then NDD said the hard disk partition table had been updated and asked whether to restart the system, so I restarted the system to see whether the hard disk “logical lock” had been removed.

However, this time the boot process was obviously abnormal. After the system finished BIOS self-test and recognized this hard disk, there was a very long delay (there had been no such thing just now!), and only then did it start reading drive A (I had it set to boot from A). Drive A was still the latest MS-DOS 7.10 boot disk, yet after reading for a few seconds the floppy drive light actually went out, almost like it had hung. However, after waiting about 2 minutes, the floppy drive light came back on and the message “Starting MS-DOS 7.1..” appeared, and then it still booted to A:\ as usual. The same thing happened with the ROM-DOS 7.10 boot disk.

At this point the hard disk still could not be recognized. So I ran NDD again, and it still said there were hard disk errors. Clearly NDD2002 simply cannot repair a “logical lock”. So I decided to “Undo”, but during the Undo process NDD said the Undo failed and could not continue! It could not even restore things—really dizzying!!

At this point the situation was even worse than when there had only been the “logical lock”, and even harder to repair... It can be seen that NDD’s disk repair function is rather poor, and often the more it repairs, the worse things get (I had also run into another similar incident before~~). So NDD really must be used with caution—remember that!

Got it, thanks. 【NDD isn't omnipotent either】

Thanks, moderator Wengier...

Moderator, thanks for all the self-torture

Now I finally understand why there was such a long delay during boot at that time... When I used SPFDISK to repartition and format that old hard disk, I actually found a huge number of bad sectors from beginning to end! There had been no bad sectors before using NDD, which means NDD “repaired” it into having a huge number of bad sectors, including even the first sector going bad! Sigh, looks like this old hard disk can only be scrapped now~~

Supplement: It seems that if you want to repair a logical lock, it’s still better to boot into DOS and then use SRCMBR or NetResq..

Question for the moderator: where can NetResq be downloaded? Thanks,
Also, another question: why is it that in posts where I reply, I can’t insert images or upload files? 【There is no upload option, only the 3 options OK! Post My Reply, Preview, Clear Content!】I have to make a new post myself before I can upload or insert images. System XP, browser MYIE2. I can’t figure it out, please advise, thanks

Got it!!!

The following is quoted from jssyq's post at 2003-6-25 10:55:44:
Question for the moderator: where can NetResq be downloaded? Thanks,
Also, another question: why is it that in posts where I reply, I can’t insert images or upload files? 【There is no upload option, only the 3 options OK! Post My Reply, Preview, Clear Content!】I have to make a new post myself before I can upload or insert images. System XP, browser MYIE2. I can’t figure it out, please advise, thanks

Try choosing “Reply” or “Quote”, then you can upload files. Don’t choose “Quick Reply”.

As for NetResq, there is a download in the “DOS Software Download” section, but I feel it is too complicated to use.

Got it, thanks, I'll try it next time

Thanks, I still wanted to try it, good thing the OP was here!!