leadfoot@leftlane.ucs.dec.com (Mark Curtis) (03/02/91)
I have a PS2 machine with a hard disk, 120MB 3.5" that has developed a defective area. It seemed to be just a few sectors at first, but now it seems to be a whole track. This system has never reported a bad sector before two days ago. The disk is 120MB and I am using MSDOS 3.3 so I have it partitioned into C:, D:, E:, and F:. The bad area is in the C: partition. Using Norton Utilities and PCtools, I have found that the bad area starts at sector 53312 and ends at maybe 52350 or so. I backed up the entire drive C:,D:,E:, and F: with PCtools and tried to use the control-A menu on the configuration disk that came with the machine. It has a entry for formatting the hard disk, this is a low level format isn't it? Anyway after warning me about three times that this will erase all of the data on the disk it started to format the drive. Then it stopped at cyl 207 and complained that the area was defective, but not listed in the manufacture's defect list. Of course it isn't, It wasn't bad until a few days ago. Anyway it refuses to mark the area as bad and add it to the defect list. I beleive that these disks, ESDI on a PS2 P70, use some kind of subsitution of special spare tracks to "cover up" for bad areas. I can not get the formatter to do this. What am I doing wrong? The format program says top replace the controller. Yeh sure buddy. Help! Mark
efeustel@prime.com (Ed Feustel) (03/04/91)
You might try Ontrack's Disk Manager for the PS/2. It is very helpful for both SCSI and ESDI drives, especially ones that were not originally manufactured/supplied by IBM.