dowling@oasys.dt.navy.mil (John Dowling) (03/14/91)
I've just run into a hard disk problem that I hope someone has some insight on. Simply put, the hard drive on my month-old Epson Apex no longer boots. The drive worked flawlessly until I turned on the machine last night. Instead of the familiar C:/ prompt, I received the message "non-system disk..." and the machine would go no farther. I turned the machine off then on again and after 30 seconds of nothing, the boot-up diagnostic program reported "drive 0 error". After consulting my manual, I determined that "drive 0" is the "C" drive. I then ran the diagnostic diskette I received with the computer and ran the hard drive tests. I believe I ran a read, write test on the disk and received the following error message: "Error code=1702; Write error; Cylinder 614; Head 7; Sector 1". Does anybody know what this means? The only thing I think I could have done is approximately one week ago I attempted to repartition the drive into c: and d: drives. If it makes any difference the drive is 40MB. Is the situation salvageable by re-formatting the disk or should I just forget it and exercise my warranty? John Dowling dowling@oasys.dt.navy.mil
gt0652b@prism.gatech.EDU (I don't know man, he was just here) (03/15/91)
In article <6391@oasys.dt.navy.mil> dowling@oasys.dt.navy.mil (John Dowling) writes: >I've just run into a hard disk problem that I hope someone has some >insight on. Simply put, the hard drive on my month-old Epson Apex no >longer boots. The drive worked flawlessly until I turned on the machine >last night. Instead of the familiar C:/ prompt, I received the message >"non-system disk..." and the machine would go no farther. I turned There are several thing that might be wrong with the disk. 1. First, if you are using DOS 4.01, try reinstalling dos from the orgonal floppies. Sometimes the boot sector gets messed up using this version of dos. With 4.01, you can't just load a new command.com and be over with it. Instead, you have to install all 7 disks. 2. If the disk boots up some of the time, then you might need to do a low level format of your drive with Fdisk.exe. This is the only case where an MS-DOS computer will do things some of the time. It works tis way because dos reads a drive 3 times before it determines that the drive is unreadable. If had a marjinally bad sector, then it might get read by the 3rd try and boot. 3. You mentioned earlier that you had tried to repartition you hard disk. You didn't, by chance, happen to run to run any of the following: 1. A different version of DOS (Big Mistake: frags whole drive) 2. An earlier version of PCtools or Norton utilities. 3. Windows 3.0, Smartdrive, and Disk Managerr at the same time. If you did, then my sympathies. Try reformatting your hard disk or using a disk recovery program such as Pctools' Diskfix.exe. But, be warned, these programs can REALLY screw up your data! See ya -- ***************************************************************************** * Joshua I. Guttman (404)355-3908 Home ** Norm Is Lord! * * gt0652b@prism.gatech.edu (404)355-0001 Business ************************** * josh@triad.com (404)242-1922 Triad Technologies *