tpersky@helix.nih.gov (Ted Persky) (12/03/90)
Hello, I've been having problems with my 40 MB hard disk on my Wyse 286 PC. I have a two-year-old Seagate ST 251 hard disk with two DOS partitions on it, C and D. Recently I started getting messages such as "Sector not found, retry, abort, ignore" when accessing certain programs and files. When I ran the Disk Manager diagnostic software, it came up with a slew of bad sectors, which changed each time I ran it! (The disk had come from the factory with a list of only three bad tracks.) A similar type of disk checker which comes with the Wyse version of DOS gave similar results. I decided to run the IBM Virscan program to check for viruses. It encountered a few binaries for which it couldn't read a sector, but for the most part it got thru, finding no viruses with which it was familiar. Then I ran Norton's Disk Doctor on both the C and D partitions. 'D' ran fine, no problems, although most of the *.exe and *.com files are on 'C'. On 'C' Disk Doctor found about 15-20 clusters which were bad, and marked them as such. Then I ran Virscan a final time, and it came up negative for viruses. A short time later I had trouble running the DOS 'help' command: again "Sector not found". This time I ran Norton's "Disk Fixer" program, I believe it's called, on the one file, "help.exe". That seemed to solve that problem, as well as a few similar problems with other *.exe files. My questions are: 1. Why should a two-year-old disk, which I've treated with kid gloves (no bulletin-board programs, surge-suppressor, only parttime usage) have so many bad clusters after such a short time? 2. What does Disk Fixer do that Disk Doctor didn't? 3. Would physically reformatting my disk with the Disk Manager software and then with DOS fdisk, get rid of the bad clusters, or am I now stuck with them? Thanx for your help! -- Ted Persky phone: (301) 496-2963 Building 12A, Room 2031 uucp: uunet!nih-csl!tpersky National Institutes of Health Internet: tpersky@alw.nih.gov Bethesda, MD 20892
jc58+@andrew.cmu.edu (Johnny J. Chin) (12/04/90)
Ted wrote: >1. Why should a two-year-old disk, which I've treated with kid gloves > (no bulletin-board programs, surge-suppressor, only parttime usage) > have so many bad clusters after such a short time? Sector not found errors come up from just simple use. Sectors on a disk track can get misaligned and cause this error. >3. Would physically reformatting my disk with the Disk Manager software > and then with DOS fdisk, get rid of the bad clusters, or am I now > stuck with them? Yes, this should solve your problem. Remember to enter the bad sector map that was supplied with the drive. It may also be a good idea to have Disk Manager (or whatever you're using) verify the tracks and make sure that there aren't any more bad sectors (if there are, mark them). One further thing that I've noticed is that Norton's DT (disk test) and NDD (Norton Disk Doctor) don't detect bad sectors unless, either they were marked at low-level format or a sector is severely misaligned or bad. You can try this by first low-level formatting the drive without any bad sectors and try running NDD or DT. Try it ... good luck. Please don't hesitate to drop me a line. __________ ___ / \ / / /_/ / /\/ _/ / / / __/. /__ / / / / / / / / "Happy Computing ..." / / Internet: Johnny.J.Chin@andrew.cmu.edu / ------- / 4730 Centre Ave. #412 BITnet: jc58@andrew \__________/ Pittsburgh, PA 15213 UUCP: ...!uunet!andrew.cmu.edu!jc58 Computer Dr. Carnegie Mellon University "If you don't like having backups ... try driving without your spare tire." ______________________________________________________________________________ Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are STRICTLY my own, and not CMU's.