Formatting And Partitioning The Drive - Seagate ST9235 Family Installation Manual

8 ST9235 Family Installation Guide, Rev. B
your system BIOS may look for 4 bytes of ECC. If your system
BIOS expects 4 bytes of ECC and the drive supplies a different
number of bytes, some drive diagnostic programs may fail,
typically resulting in time-out errors. Consult your system docu-
mentation or call your system dealer or manufacturer for infor-
mation on configuring your system to receive 11 bytes of ECC.

Formatting and partitioning the drive

Caution. Formatting or partitioning a drive that contains data
may result in a partial or complete loss of that data.
Make sure all data has been safely backed up before
repartitioning or reformatting a drive. Seagate Tech-
nology assumes no liability for lost data.
Low-level formatting
Seagate AT Interface drives are low-level formatted at the factory
and do not require additional low-level formatting prior to use.
Partitioning
A single disc drive can be subdivided into partitions that behave
as separate drives (labeled C, D, E, etc.). Versions of DOS prior
to Version 4.0 are not able to access more than 32 Mbytes of disc
space as a single drive. Therefore, drives having a capacity of
over 32 Mbytes must be divided into several smaller partitions
for use with these older versions of DOS. Seagate does not
recommend using ST9235 family drives with DOS versions prior to
Version 3.3.
To partition a drive, you must first boot the system using a floppy
disk that contains system files. Partition the drive using the DOS
FDISK utility program (described in your DOS manual). If you are
partitioning a drive that will be used to boot the system, make
sure that the primary DOS partition is marked active.