autochk not found
Sorry I took so long to respond. I thought this thread was over until someone sent me an email with a few questions today. In certain hardware and software configurations, the MS HotFix that I mentioned does indeed cause the error message "autochk not found" to appear on the display, but it does not cause the computer to reboot afterward like the Hidden NTFS Partition problem.
I was successfully able to emulate the Hidden NTFS issue on my computer by using PTEDIT to mark the partition type as 0x17, and if you're interested in trying it you will find the same repeatable results on any computer running Windows. You can then boot on a floppy and use PTEDIT to switch it back to type 0x07 so that your hard drive boots properly again.
However, the Hotfix is a somewhat different problem. Although it displays the same error message, "autochk not found", it still continues to load Windows and therefore allows you to remove the HotFix. As I mentioned before, the HotFix seems to have problems specific to a particular hardware and/or software configuration, and I should add that it is possibly related to Dell's OEM Partition which is used for diagnostics and reinstallation of Windows on certain models of Dell computers. The XP Disk Management tool refuses to delete OEM Partitions since they contain a Master Boot Record provided by the OEM (see the URL
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkd_tro_jqjy.asp for more details). Since the MBR directly invokes "autochk", it seems likely that the problem lies in their modified boot partition. Any attempt to install Windows from Microsoft's distribution disks on a Dell computer that is configured like this will report that the computer has a "nonstandard MBR". Therefore, I think it's a fairly good guess that the problem with the HotFix problem is specific to Dell's modified MBR. Unfortunately, I was providing tech support via telephone so I was unable to investigate it further. The HotFix works fine in most systems.
If you are running a dual boot, or if your boot drive and your system drive were originally configured for separate partitions, you might want to use PTEDIT to check both the boot partition and the system partition to make sure that neither one is configured as partition type 0x17. If either one is, and it was originally an NTFS Primary Partition, it should be changed to 0x07.
You should probably note the fact that if you ALREADY HAD A PRIMARY DOS PARTITION WHEN INSTALLING XP, the XP installation program automatically configures the Primary DOS partition as your "boot partition". Any new partitions that you add from unallocated space (whether formatted as FAT, FAT32 or NTFS) will be marked as your "system partition". In this case, when you look at your partitions with Disk Manager, one will be marked as "(Boot)" and the other will be marked as "(System)". However, if you use a simplistic DOS tool like FDISK to delete the Primary DOS partition, you are also deleting XP's Boot Partition (with no warning from FDISK.)
If there is more than one Primary DOS Partition (which are created by default whenever a primary partition is added by XP's Disk Management tool or third-party tools like PowerQuest's "Partition Manager"), FDISK will simply get confused.
If you have a partition (or drive) larger than 64G, FDISK will also get entirely confused. Microsoft provides a link which allows you to download a version of FDisk which works with drives and partitions larger than 64G. Please refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 263044 for more information at the following URL:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;263044[/url]
Just to confuse us a little further, when XP creates an "Extended Partition", it actually creates an "Extended DOS Partition", officially known as "ExtendedX", or Partition Type (hexidecimal) 0x0F (or decimal) 15. This is a little proprietary Partition Type that Microsoft made up all on their own and has caused nightmares for innocent users all over the world, especially those who use OS/2 or Linux. XP will gladly allow you to create an Extended Partition larger than 64G. Of course, the distribution copy of FDISK will not recognize it, so you need to download the special version from the link I mentioned earlier.
For instance, if you use XP to create a 67G "Extended DOS Partition" (also called "ExtendedX" or "Extended-LBA"), the distribution copy of FDISK will report it as being only 3G -- because it "rolls over" and starts at ZERO again when it hits the 64G boundary. 67G minus 64G equals 3G. (This is a perfect example of poorly-written, poorly-maintained code similar to the Y2K lack of foresight.) Furthermore, if you have assigned logical drives to the Extended Partition in XP, FDISK will not allow you to delete them. Hence, it will also not allow you to delete the entire "Extended DOS Partition" itself. So why the heck do they call it an "Extended DOS Partition" if the DOS Partition tool doesn't even recognize it?
As if all of this is not bad enough, there is another boundary that gets in the way. In order to use a FAT32 Partition larger than 137G, your BIOS must support 48-bit Logical Block Addressing (LBA), which is applicable only to ATAPI drives, but not to SCSI drives or necessarily to certain SATA drives which "look like SCSI" to XP. XP Service Pack 1 handles this issue itself rather than relying on the BIOS, assuming that you have the latest version of the file ATAPI.SYS. For more information about this, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 303013 at the following URL:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013
The sad part about all of this is that Microsoft's partitioning tools -- the ones provided with DOS and all the different versions of Windows (3.x/9x/ME/NT/2K/XP) -- have been designed to intentionally cripple the user's ability to configure partitioning options, in order to discourage dual boots with other operating systems.
Personally, I prefer to configure my virtual memory swap file as a fixed-length file, about 2 to 2.5 times the size of my actual RAM, on a dedicated partition of its own. That way it never becomes fragmented and never resizes. With this configuration, it is most efficient to format the "Swap Partition" using FAT32 or FAT16, rather than NTFS. I prefer to use the very beginning of the hard disk as the Swap Partition, because the beginning of the drive is almost always the fastest part of the drive. You can find information on that subject at the following URL and numerous others:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/securing/chap6sec74.html
With two identical (or well-matched) hard drives, if you create a Swap File of the same size on both hard drives, it will have the added performance advantage of using RAID0 technology for Virtual Memory even if your drives are not configured for RAID0.
However, the installation utilities for DOS and Windows do not allow this configuration while simultaneously assigning drive letter "C:" to your system/boot drive, so you need to either have a spare drive with XP or Win2K already installed on it or you have to use Linux tools or some other third-party application in order to achieve these results.
Well, enough with my pet peeves... Hope this helps.
Brad