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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (12779)	9/30/2001 1:35:29 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Respond to of 14778

So I take it that you're writing off any data you had on the HDD, right? If so, you can try another format, try a high-level first to completely rescatter the magnetic media. Norton may not be able to recover the data because it's lost its vital system files, so you might try reloading your OS (if that is still an option) with your Windows recovery disk, and then reloading Norton. And I would advise you to obtain a new hard-drive as soon as possible, preferably an IBM drive. I recently went through a major hassle when one of my HDD started eating itself up. I replaced it with a Western Digital 40gig and swapped over the data, and removed the old drive. But then my new drive started corrupting my system files, including norton, and in the process of using the System File restorer utility, it lead to an all-around hardware crash as noted in my POST messages as I would reboot between fixes. It would warn me that a hardware failure was eminent and that I should immediately back up all my data. However, I STUPIDLY misinterpreted this as being a Windows related issue given all the corrupt files I had developed, and not hardware related since it was a brand new drive. Oh, was that painful.... truly painful.... 20 Gig of data destroyed (some of which I still had on my original drive, thankfully).. But anyway... I've decided to stick with redundant IBM drives from now on, because it simply beats the alternative. Bottom line, without knowing exactly what happens when you boot up, or whether you regular Windows recovery disk will permit to you reload your OS, it's hard to say. But a reload shouldn't cause you anymore damage than has already occured, if you aren't receiving a Hardware warning in the POST, as occurred with me.. (I'll never ignore a POST warning like that again... :0) Hawk

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (12779)	9/30/2001 1:38:44 PM
From: wily	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Dave, You sound pretty relaxed about your HDD problem, from which I infer that there's nothing life-critical on the drive. I've had so many traumatic HDD experiences that I run not walk to the store for a new drive as soon as mine so much as hiccups. I've also learned not to play with my HDDs. They don't like that. I like the idea of using a hard drive for removable storage, as a poster mentioned a few weeks ago. That way, you have a HDD ready to go when your current drive starts messing up. Just leave a large primary partition empty on the backup drive to receive the OS. He uses a removable-drive-bay to make backing up easy. I take it you have PartitionMagic. It's my ace in the hole for dealing with computers. wily

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (12779)	9/30/2001 3:07:16 PM
From: werefrog	Respond to of 14778

"Surface scan found about 4 bad sectors in addition to several it identified a few weeks ago." format c: /u will do a high level format, map the HD, locate and mark bad sectors, so when you install windows, bad sectors will not be used. I had a new compaq for just one week when windows would not load because system files could not be found. I ran scandisk from dos and about 50 bad sectors showed up in red. The tech dept at compaq led me through format c: /u, and all was fine for about 1 day, then same thing, only this time about 100 red sectors showed up. I formatted again and everything worked about 1 day, then same thing, only this time th HD had do many bad sectors I could'nt count them all. I tried another format c: /u, but this time I could'nt even boot to dos. I later found out if the computer gets handled too rough, someone drops it, whatever, the HD magnatism may be damaged. Compaq replaced my HD the next business day and every thing has worked fine ever since. So: <<should I get a new HD>> yes, it's the only fix. <<this one is not old, but possibly bad?>> If you have many bad sectors, and they are easily visable running scandisk surface scan at the dos prompt, the HD is"bad". I have Norton Utilities but I did not use it when working on my HD problem when I called compaq tech dept. I have performed highlevel formating on several computers for many years, and have found I could format c: all I wanted to and it does not harm the HD.

To: Dave Bissett who wrote (12779)	9/30/2001 11:04:26 PM
From: Dan Duchardt	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Dave, From what others are saying here, a new disk might not be a bad idea, but I'll tell you my story as something of a counter example. Well over a year ago my then one and only HD started acting up a bit and I soon got a second one to replace the first as my primary drive. I figured I would keep the old one as a secondary for non-critical stuff until I was convinced it was totally bad or proved OK. At the time I had many bad clusters marked on the disk that had suddenly accumulated. The new disk was built rather unsuccessfully from a diskcopy, which unfortunately picked up all the bad cluster marks from the old drive. Eventually I got it squared away, but with many bad sectors still marked. I figured they probably were not really bad, but by the time I had gone that far I didn't want to fool around, and didn't really know if anything could be done to start clean anyway. As it turns out, sometime later I was able to wipe my original disk (Maxtor 6.8G) clean and reformat it, and it has been clean ever since. The new drive (WDC 6.4G) was my project for this weekend (that I'm still in the middle of) because of some serious system misbehavior of late. I've wiped it clean and did a new install of Win98 and am just taking a break from restoring all the old stuff- slowly. The trick to wiping the disk clean is not to just reformat it. A format with no flags still reads the bad cluster marks and preserves them. The first disk I cleaned I used partition magic, though it was an older version than I should have been using. The latest one I did with FDISK and it worked fine. It is set up as a single partition, which I removed and then replaced; then I ran the format. It seems the partitioning removes the bad sector marks, so format starts with a "clean disk". I think you need to do more than just move the partition though. You have to unpartition and then partition again. Of course I ran scandisk (surface scan) before loading any software. No bad clusters were found, which was no surprise since I knew all the bad clusters were from the diskcopy in the first place. So I guess the moral of the story is that SOMETIMES things happen that can mess up disk clusters that are not permanent damage, and disks can be restored. Than again, as other folks here have said, if the surface has gone bad, it's best to have a new, quality disk. Dan