greg@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Gregory Nowak) (01/21/89)
I broke down and got a copy of Norton Utilities to care for the sick seagate 20MB hard disk I mentioned a few months back. I had aready run DT and had a number of bad sectors marked. Last night, I was running NDD /COMPLETE, when *new* bad sectors kept appearing. The Estimated Time for completion of NDD was up around 2 hours, so I stopped it with Esc. The report said about 30 bad sectors had been marked, the last one being sector 969. I then ran DT. I stupidly forgot to use the /M switch to move savable sectors in bad clusters, so I stopped and restarted it with the /M switch. It moved a few saved sectors, and then I got disgusted with the whole process and decided to do some work, so I stopped DT too. After that, I decided to amuse myself by running NDD again while I was doing something else, and -- here's the weird part -- *no new bad sectors were found*. I.e., the first time I did NDD, 30 bad sectors in the first 1000; two hours later, those were marked, but no new bad sectors appeared after 969. I'm a bit puzzled; since I stopped the first NDD at random shortly after it marked sector 969, there seems to be no reason why there shouldn't have been many more bad sectors. (Of the 30 that went bad, there were several consecutive pairs, triples, and quads.) I'm forced to conclude that 1) I accidentally 'fixed' the disk in between the first and second NDD -- not that I did anything resembling maintenance except using Norton Utilities or 2) there is something wrong with the disk that causes massive *temporary* read errors. (This option is also suggested by the fact that occasionally, when attempting to run Wordperfect, I wwould get a read error on the first attempt, but no problems on the second.) Does anybody have a possible explanation for this behavior? thanks!-- rutgers!phoenix.princeton.edu!greg Gregory A Nowak/Phoenix Gang/Princeton NJ "In addition I think science has enjoyed an extraordinary success because it has such a limited and narrow realm in which to focus its efforts. Namely, the physical universe." --Ken Jenkins
bturner@hpcvlx.HP.COM (Bill Turner) (01/24/89)
I too had a Seagate 20MB disk that was slowly rotting away on me (kept getting new bad sector errors). I eventually (as soon as I could!) got another disk, copied the data from the Seagate, then, for grins and giggles, ran a low-level format on the Seagate. Seemed to be fine, but I was a bit paranoid, and the disk isn't in use currently. This is a system I use at work, and I usually leave the disk powered up. I don't think it was a thermal problem, though, as I left the system off overnight to check and it still had problems the next day. --Bill Turner