[Ham-Computers] RE: HD Problems.

[Hsu, Aaron (NBC Universal)]

Kurt,

Skip the drive scan.  IDE drives self-diagnose and will re-map bad sectors as they occur - thus, you should never see any bad sectors until all the spare sectors are used.  When this happens, it's definitely time to replace the drive!

If you wish to run a scan, download the drive diagnostic utility from the drive vendor.  It will update the drive's re-mapping table if it finds any questionable spots on the drive that the built-in intelligence doesn't pick-up.  And, if you want to be thorough, you should run a full "media analysis" prior to partitioning and formatting the drive (this is usually destructive) - again, modern IDE drives should not present any bad sectors/clusters to the OS.

Spinrite is a good test, but it doesn't interface with the re-mapping table - if the Spinrite finds errors, it's time to use the vendor's diagnostic to attempt to re-map the bad sectors, or, find a replacement drive.

73,

  - Aaron, NN6O


-----Original Message-----
From: ham-computers-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:ham-computers-bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of KD7JYK
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 2:47 PM
To: Computers (or other) used for amateur radio, communications, or experimenting
Subject: Re: [Ham-Computers] HD Problems.

I pulled the initial C drive and made the 40GB drive the primary.  I then
re-booted using a Windows98SE startup disk and used FDISK.EXE work over the
drive.  I repartitioned it into one 40GB drive, then swapped it back over to
C:\ slave and started Windows from my initial HD and used Windows to
recognize and re-format the 40GB drive.  All worked well, windows gave me
the option of a 38.5+GB format option.  After that, WIndows wanted to do a
surface scan of the drive.  At the rate it was going, I figured it would
take 16 hours.  After 12 hours, it was 10% done, so this weekend I will swap
the 40GB back into the Master HD slot and use DOS to surface scan it, it
will at least give me a sector map so I can see where the delays are coming
from.

The worst part of all this is that I have doen this exact thing on hundreds
of drives over the years when DOS was the in thing...  I forgot all the
work-arounds.

THanks for the help, Guys.

Kurt

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