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Norton Utilities 5.01 Error Messages (Users)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 14.08.2012, 00:43

N.B. I'm far from a FAT or partition or installation expert, and it's something I haven't done a lot, esp. not lately. So take it with a tiny grain of salt (even though it's not hard to do, just hard to do perfectly).

> But, in the meantime, I think I've figured out what the problem is. I
> found a web page that shows how cluster size increases with partition
> size:
>
> Well, I've got the 4 GB HD divided into two partitions of 2 GB each, so the
> cluster size is going to be 32 KB, right?
>
> And what did that NU error message tell me?
>
> "NDD will not work with drives having more than 8K bytes per sector
> or 16K bytes per cluster"
>
> Bingo!
>
> I need to reduce my partitions to one gig each, right?
Not necessarily. You only need one active FAT partition. The rest can be extended FAT partitions. So, in theory, you could have eight partitions of 512 MB each (which is probably the cutoff for 8 kb clusters for FAT16).

1 GB really wastes a lot of space in slack, though not as bad as 2 GB (32 kb? *shudder*). It doesn't matter if you don't need it, but it's horribly inefficient. I was always kicking myself when I found that out (but couldn't easily reformat).

Actually, FAT32 seems to be better about that, e.g. my 4 GB partition has 4 kb clusters (I think), so that's way better. Of course, you need a compatible DOS, e.g. FreeDOS, but that won't work with your Norton Utilities, sadly. Still, just FYI.

> I used to have a program called Partition Magic. I wonder if I can find
> it.
Presumably you can just use any old FDISK (assuming you're only running DOS, nothing else).

> But, I probably should go back and reformat and repartition from scratch,
> don't you think?
Maybe, if you can afford to waste time and data. Otherwise, you may? be able to resize the partitions with PRESZ134.ZIP.

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