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Forcing LBA mode
to access larger drives (more than 8GB size)?
Problem:
I use Windows NT installed under VMWare. I'm trying to scan partition
having
size 10GB or greater and get an error message saying "Error reading physical sector". Is it
a drive's problem or your software does not support drives more than
8GB?
Reason:
It could be bad clusters on the drive as well as BIOS/OS that does not
support LBA
mode problem.
MS-DOS versions prior to 6.0 does not support LBA mode. Some
versions of BIOS could report that LBA mode is not supported for larger
drives, however actually it does. VMWare v.3.0 is an example. Active@
Partition Recovery
tries read the drive 100 times. In case of read failure it reports this
problem.
Solution:
Make sure that you boot your system using the proper version of DOS. If it is MS-DOS then
version must be 6.0+.
In most cases you do NOT need to tell Active@ Partition Recovery to force LBA
mode, because if BIOS supports it, Active@ Partition Recovery does it automatically, giving
you access to larger sized hard drives.
If BIOS reports that LBA mode is not supported, Active@ Partition
Recovery uses standard
Int13h to access the drive.
You could try to force LBA mode by starting Active@ Partition Recovery with a parameter
-LBA,
for example:
A:\>PR.EXE -LBA
However it will not help if BIOS actually does not support LBA mode.
It usually happens with old versions of BIOS. In this case you can try to
take out HDD and plug it to another machine having newer version of BIOS.
In situation if your drive has lots of bad clusters, its advisable to save
your data onto another physical drive and to get rid of the damaged
hard
drive.
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