naparst@weyl.Berkeley.EDU (Harold Naparst) (06/15/87)
I recently removed my hard disk without parking the heads and destroyed a large part (maybe 10%) of my disk. By repeatedly running Norton's Disktest on it and deleting the bad files, I was able to get it to the point that Norton thought that no files were corrupted, but apparently the FAT said that certain bad clusters were in use by files when in fact Norton said they were not. Norton advised me that this was not a harmful situation, but I would not be able to use these clusters ever again. In spite of this assurance from Norton that my disk was OK, I kept getting the message "General Disk Failure: Drive C", so I decided to reformat the disk. This caused a number of interesting occurances. For one, certain clusters that were bad before were no longer bad upon running disktest. Second, I still got the same "General Disk Failure: Drive C" message, along with "seek error" messages. Do you have any advice ? Harold Naparst (naparst@cartan.berkeley.edu or ucbvax!weyl!naparst)
jvc@mirror.UUCP (06/16/87)
At this point, a regular hard disk format won't be enough. You should do a low level format and then do a DOS format. jvc@mirror.TMC.COM