Conference decwet::windows-nt

5882.0. "DOS can't access partition formatted with FAT from Windows NT or Win95" by LNZALI::BACHNER (Mouse not found. Click OK to continue) Mon Apr 07 1997 02:36

Recently, I added two RZ25 disks to my Venturis which already has an EIDE disk
to boot from. The connection is done through a ASUS SC-800 (?) SCSI host adapter
(based on the NCR/Symbios 53C810 chip). This adapter is also for a CD-ROM device.

The EIDE disks has a primary (C:) partition and an extended partition with
logical drives D: (FAT) and E: (NTFS). The PC has three operating systems
installed: DOS 6.22 and Windows 95 on drive C:, and Windows NT Server V3.51 SP5
on drive E:.

The two disks are seen without problems from WinNT and Win95. As the adapter has
no BIOS, I use the following drivers from Symbios when booting DOS:

- ASPI8XX
- SYMCD
- SYMDISK

The RZ25s have a single extended partition and two logical drives each.
SYMDISK happily reports the two disks and assigns drive letters E: and F: to the
first one, G: and H: to the second one (note that E: on the EIDE disk is not
seen/assigned by DOS due to NTFS, so the drive letter is available for the SCSI
disks).

I used FDISK from DOS V6.22 to create the partitions, then booted WinNT and
formatted all 4 logical drives with FAT with the NT disk administrator. I can
use the disks without problems (in fact, I already copied/installed stuff on
them) from WinNT and from Win95. However, when I try to access them from DOS, I
get an error message close to

"invalid media type in drive G:" (or whatever drive I try)
The exact message is "Ung�ltiger Datentr�ger in Laufwerk G:" in my German DOS
version. Of course, FDISK sees the logical drives, but lists them as type
'unknown'.

I tried to (re-)format one of the partitions with Windows 95 but still could not
use it from DOS.

Any idea what's causing this problem ?  Do I really need to reformat the drives
with DOS and then re-copy, re-install the stuff that's already there ?

Thanks for your help,
Hans.