I found this site today and have found it very useful. I am copying a post that I made on the microsoft newsgroup on june 27 but got no response. I have found the posts by "mac" to be extremly informative and I hope if you read this post you will find time to offer your advice. I am including the following info about my computer since I have noticed you asking for it in numerous posts. Dell deminsion 2100 windows ME drive c 20gb(original) drive d 100gb(added soon after buying digital camera!) 356mb ram drive is set up as sent by dell (copied message) Hello, While running an online virus scanner my Norton Antivirus popped up a warning and I followed the prompts. After a few minutes the system became unstable and I had to shut it down. When I restarted some of my data was gone. For instance if I click on "favorites" some links are there, but many are not. If I click on my "casio" icon none of my digital photos are there. I ran a couple of data recovery programs and they found nothing. Somewhere along the way Windows ME became REALLY screwed up so I changed that drive over as a slave. I then went to "my computer" and did a search on the bad drive for "favorites" and "casio". Both searches found all of the missing data and what appears to be numerous duplicate folders with the same name. Some of them have the same data and others have only partial or no data at all. This affects more than just to two mentioned folders used as examples. What I need to do is make back ups of my data and then wipe the drive and start again. Is there a method to this or a program that I can run that will help me with this. I will be doing back ups to a cd burner and the drive is 100 gig at about 40% full. Some thoughts I had were to delete data as it is transfered to the cd to eliminate clutter. I also was considering running a program that compares like files to eliminate duplicates and when everything is complete I was going to use the Western Digital site to "write zeros" to this drive so I can have a clean drive to start from. Any advice offered would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, jeff

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just while your waiting.....he's an old man, it may take awhile, LOL! (sorry mac, just kidding) http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winme/r1043993952

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

sorry, this is the one i was looking for, my bad


On Saturday, July 10, 2004 at 11:23 pm, joe wrote:
>just while your waiting.....he's an old man, it may take awhile, LOL! (sorry mac,
>just kidding)
>
>
>http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winme/r1043993952 http://users.adelphia.net/~jgulley/me/index.html

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Hey, thanks Joe! Lots of good info there. Its amazing what posting on the right board can do. My MS newsgroup post is quickly slipping away into oblivian and not one comment. Not to mention there appears to be lots more help and recommendations to search through here. Again, I appreciate your response! Jeff

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

hey, no prob jeff, ALOT of GREAT help here, mac, carol, steve,jabuck,jack,grandpa, just to name a small few to whom will always be around to contribute any help you need, plus you can just search the site for simular probs that either arrise or might arrise and, well i book mark 'em for future reference, the home page has alot of great info and links as well, good luck ;) -joe


On Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 1:17 am, jeff wrote:
>Hey, thanks Joe!
>
>Lots of good info there. Its amazing what posting on the right board can do. My
>MS newsgroup post is quickly slipping away into oblivian and not one comment. Not
>to mention there appears to be lots more help and recommendations to search through
>here.
>
>Again, I appreciate your response! Jeff

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

what I do is make a ghost of my hard drive and burn it to a cd. give it a name with a date. your drive may be too large, I don't know how small a file it could be compressed to. since my drive is partitioned I ghost the c drive, main partition, to another partition. then burn that onto a cd. you could ghost to your slave drive, though. I have norton ghost but did NOT install it on my computer. all you need is the ghost.exe file copied from the cd onto a floppy or a bootable cd. my win98 boot disk was full so I just put it in the a drive and boot then take it out and put the ghost disk in and type ghost and it runs in dos. I think there are some free ghost programs on the net. if you haven't done this before, and even if you have, be very careful to choose your winme partition as the source so that you don't write over it! Donna


On Saturday, July 10, 2004 at 9:42 pm, jeff wrote:
>I found this site today and have found it very useful. I am copying a post that
>I made on the microsoft newsgroup on june 27 but got no response. I have found the
>posts by "mac" to be extremly informative and I hope if you read this post you will
>find time to offer your advice. I am including the following info about my computer
>since I have noticed you asking for it in numerous posts.
>
>Dell deminsion 2100
>windows ME
>drive c 20gb(original)
>drive d 100gb(added soon after buying digital camera!)
>356mb ram
>drive is set up as sent by dell
>
>(copied message)
>Hello,
>
>While running an online virus scanner my Norton Antivirus
>popped up a warning and I followed the prompts. After a
>few minutes the system became unstable and I had to shut
>it down.
>
>When I restarted some of my data was gone. For instance
>if I click on "favorites" some links are there, but many
>are not. If I click on my "casio" icon none of my digital
>photos are there.
>
>I ran a couple of data recovery programs and they found
>nothing. Somewhere along the way Windows ME became REALLY
>screwed up so I changed that drive over as a slave. I
>then went to "my computer" and did a search on the bad
>drive for "favorites" and "casio". Both searches found
>all of the missing data and what appears to be numerous
>duplicate folders with the same name. Some of them have
>the same data and others have only partial or no data at
>all. This affects more than just to two mentioned folders
>used as examples.
>
>What I need to do is make back ups of my data and then
>wipe the drive and start again. Is there a method to this
>or a program that I can run that will help me with this.
>I will be doing back ups to a cd burner and the drive is
>100 gig at about 40% full.
>
>Some thoughts I had were to delete data as it is
>transfered to the cd to eliminate clutter. I also was
>considering running a program that compares like files to
>eliminate duplicates and when everything is complete I was
>going to use the Western Digital site to "write zeros" to
>this drive so I can have a clean drive to start from.
>
>Any advice offered would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Thanks, jeff
>
>

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Donna, Thanks for your reply! I plan to implement many of the tips I have found such as the partitioning that you spoke of in your post. My problem for the time being is that my 100 gig drive has become something of a mess and therefore I do not wish to simply copy it. I have duplicate folders and Im sure far too much clutter. I want to get this cleaned up so I can start fresh and do it better the next time around. I have had people tell my to try restore but unfortunately that began having problems several months ago and was not creating restore points and the ones I do have say they cannot be used. What I am hoping to find is a methodology to picking the the info I need from the drive and then wiping the rest. I am not worried about programs because I have disks for everything I need to reinstall. Its the things like word documents, pictures not part of my digital camera folder, favorites, etc. Is there a sensable way to pull this type if info and get it organized on a cd so that when I do get the drive set up properly I can put this info back where it belongs. As I am trying to recall the details of your post(dont want to go back for fear of loosing what I have already typed) and maybe I have misunderstood. If so please feel free to correct me. One thought I have is that you are suggesting to leave the drive as is and partition it to run ME on a 10gig partition and by doing so would allow me to sort all the clutter on the other sections of my drive to be sorted without having to make all the cd copies. Would this method be acceptable? I also would like to know if anyone has a recommendation for a program that would compare like files and allow me to delete duplicates safely and possibly locate and clean files that are no longer associated with current programs. I am trying not to make any further changes to the drive until I have a good idea of the solution to my problem so I dont make a small problem a big one!! (I hope to do something soon because my 20 gig c drive is operating on about 1 gig of free space and I know thats not a good practice and asking for trouble.) Thanks for your help. Jeff

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Free MS Update CD

Hello Jeff, with this amount of data I would use another computer to transfer all 
of it to so that you can wipe your drives and re-install. Other methods would take 
far too long and use a lot of materials for no return, such as CDRs

As a matter of interest to me, please may I ask you a favour? Can you say if your 
drives are partitioned at all and whether they are or not, would you be so good as 
to go to each drive in turn and type chkdsk to see the cluster size, i.e. the number 
of bytes per allocation unit.

You can do this in a DOS window.

C:\WINDOWS>chkdsk

C:\WINDOWS>D: , and press Enter

D:\>chkdsk

And so on.

Mine reads "4096 bytes in each allocation unit" on all four drives. This is the same 
as NTFS.

FYI , 4096 bytes is reckoned to be the optimum cluster size.

You can obtain this cluster size on a FAT32 volume using: A:\>format c: /Z:8

It is recommended to partition drives with fdisk with a maximum of four partitions 
per physical drive.

Thanks in advance,


Mac

WINDOWS HELP  RAM

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Free MS Update CD

Hello Donna,

As a matter of interest to me, please may I ask you a favour? Can you say if your 
drives are partitioned at all and whether they are or not, would you be so good as 
to go to each drive in turn and type chkdsk to see the cluster size, i.e. the number 
of bytes per allocation unit.

You can do this in a DOS window.

C:\WINDOWS>chkdsk

C:\WINDOWS>D: , and press Enter

D:\>chkdsk

And so on.

Mine reads "4096 bytes in each allocation unit" on all four drives. This is the same 
as NTFS.

FYI , 4096 bytes is reckoned to be the optimum cluster size.

You can obtain this cluster size on a FAT32 volume using: A:\>format c: /Z:8

My ME computer runs MUCH better since I have partitioned and made this the default 
cluster size. The same is true for 98 Operating Systems.

It is recommended to partition drives with fdisk with a maximum of four partitions 
per physical drive.
Mac

WINDOWS HELP  RAM

[Reply or follow-up to this message]

Hello Mac, Thank you for your time in responding to my post. chkdsk results: Drive c 19,541,504 kb total 1,174,608 kb free 16,384 b in each unit 1,221,344 total units 73,413 available 655,360 total mem 593,840 free drive D: 97,659,328kb total disk 65,684,224kb free 32,768 b in each unit 3,051,854 total units 2,052,632 Available Your post stated "You can obtain this cluster size on a FAT32 volume using: A:\>format c: /Z:8" is this something I should do now or do I need to wait. I saw another post of yours stating that a format could be done on a drive in use and instructions on how do so. Just havent followed up on that yet. Thanks again. Jeff

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Hello Mac,

Thank you for your time in responding to my post.

chkdsk results:

Drive C: 19,541,504 kb total 1,174,608 kb free 16,384 b in each unit 1,221,344 total 
units 73,413 available 655,360 total mem 593,840 free 

Drive D: 97,659,328kb total disk 65,684,224kb free 32,768 b in each unit 3,051,854 
total units 2,052,632 Available 

Your post stated "You can obtain this cluster size on a FAT32 volume using: A:\>format 
c: /Z:8" is this something I should do now or do I need to wait?

I saw another post of yours stating that a format could be done on a drive in use 
and instructions on how do to so. Just haven't followed up on that yet.

Thanks again, Jeff

Drive C: = 18.63 Gb , 16,384 bytes per allocation unit
Drive D: = 93.14 Gb , 32,768 bytes per allocation unit

These drives are huge and because they are using FAT32 the cluster sizes are very 
high.
I would, personally partition them both, especially as you are less likely to lose 
all of the data on one drive at any one time unless the drive fails completely.

You can only format a drive that is empty. Formatting removes ALL data!

So if your C: drive is OK, and your D: drive is empty you can format your D: drive.

I would start over and reinstall with drives this size. Work out what you need to 
do and partition drive 1. Four drives per physical drive is the maximum.

Primary DOS drive C: set Active. (Mine is only 4·0 Gb)

An Extended Partition which takes up the rest of the drive and three logical drives 
D: (Documents) E: (Email) F: (Music)

Then on drive 2 another Extended DOS partition with four drives, G: H: I: & J:





On drive 1 there is not a problem as it is easy to get four drives under 8Gb so they 
will come out to 4096 bytes anyway.

Drive D: is something to experiment with, which is what I am doing. Four 25Gb drives 
will still have a large cluster size unless you force the smaller size using the 
/Z:8 switch.

Up to you, Jeff.
Mac

WINDOWS HELP  RAM

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Thanks Mac, you have been very helpful and generous with your time. I appreciate your help. now I'll take a deep breath and jump into it and hope for the best! jeff

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Free MS Update CD

Thank you Jeff, But before you jump, just read this MS KB Article which was brought 
to my attention this morning.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q229154

To get this 8k cluster size you would need to use: A:\>format c: /Z:16

It might be that this is a better compromise.

I'll be re-formatting my C: drive later on today to 8k clusters to see if it does 
improve the running of ME at all.
Mac

WINDOWS HELP  RAM

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