Hard drive looses partition info.

Hi,

We are having a major, but very infrequent, problem. We are running QNX
4.25E on
a Versalogic VSBC6 w/64MB RAM and below is a “sin ver” of the system.

PROGRAM NAME VERSION DATE
sys/Proc32 Proc 4.25L Feb 15 2001
sys/Proc32 Slib16 4.23G Oct 04 1996
sys/Slib32 Slib32 4.24B Aug 12 1997
/bin/Fsys Fsys32 4.24V Feb 18 2000
/bin/Fsys.eide eide 4.25A Feb 09 2000
//210/bin/Dev32 Dev32 4.23G Oct 04 1996
//210/bin/Dev32.ansi Dev32.ansi 4.23H Nov 21 1996
//210/bin/Dev32.par Dev.par 4.26 Feb 24 2000
//210/bin/Dev32.pty Dev32.pty 4.23G Oct 04 1996
//210/bin/Pipe Pipe 4.23A Feb 26 1996
//210/bin/Net Net 4.25C Aug 30 1999
//210//Net.ether9000 Net.ether900 4.24E Feb 17 2000
//210/bin/Mqueue mqueue 4.24A Aug 30 1999
//210/
/usr/ucb/Socket Socket 4.25C Aug 19 1998
//210/bin/Dev32.ser Dev32.ser 4.23I Jun 27 1997
//210//bin/Photon Photon 1.14B Sep 03 1999
//210/
/bin/phfontpfr Photon Font 1.14H Jun 05 2000

Our problem is that with over 200 systems in the field we have had 2
returned
because they would no longer boot. When we booted the system from the
floppy drive we found out that the hard drive partition table was zeroed.
No
partition was defined.

The hard drives are the small 31/2 drives used in laptops and one was a
~4GB
and the other ~6GB drive. The drives were set up as LBA and “fdisk”
reported
the number of heads, tracks, cylinders correctly, but all partition
information was
0.

Now a third hard drive appears to have lost its partition information.
Luckily
the customer called us because they could not start new programs, but the
ones
running were doing fine. We called in over the modem and ran “fdisk” and it
reports all partitions zeroed.

Any ideas, solutions, comments would be greatly welcomed. TIA

\

Ivan Bannon
RJG Inc.