E.Ireland@massey.ac.nz (Evan Ireland) (09/25/90)
I have an enquiry from a friend who wants to know where information on bad tracks (disk defects) is stored. Programs suxh as Ontrack's Disk Manager (DM) can scan a hard disk for bad sectors, and create a flaw map file which specifies the bad tracks. The question is: how is this bad track information made known to DOS? I suspect that all clusters on a bad track are marked as bad clusters (FF7 or FFF7 cluster entry value in the FAT), and no other information on bad tracks is stored on the disk. Am I correct, or is additional information about bad tracks stored somewhere on the disk? Please reply by email, as I don't always have time to read this newsgroup, and so I may miss the response. Evan Ireland (E.Ireland@massey.ac.nz), School of Information Sciences, Massey University, Palmerston North, NZ.