duvalj@bionette.cgrb.orst.edu (Joe Duval) (09/21/90)
Netters, An old XT I have an occasion to use, won't boot from the harddrive anymore. I can boot from a floppy in A and then get to the harddrive (ST225). I ran Norton's Disk Doctor and it did find bad blocks in the space where IBMIO.SYS was on the disk. I had it fix (move) them. Was that a mistake? And it found about 7 other bad blocks on the disk that it wanted to mark bad and move the data from. After that the machine will still not boot from the hard drive. I tried running SYS to replace the system files but the old not enough room error occured. I did use the same DOS 3.3 disk that was used about a year and a half ago when I replaced the hard disk in this machine. I then tried running SPINRITE to see if it could do anything. Again the machine will not boot but SPINRITE did recover most if not all of the bad blocks marked by NDD. So what can I do know to save this hard drive short of backing up what I can and reformatting? Why would this happen in the first place? The machine is used once or twice a week AT LEAST and there were no other problems. Thanks -Joe -- Joe Duval duvalj@bionette.cgrb.orst.edu Losing your temper generally represents the incipient stage of rectal- cranial inversion.
karlson@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Eric Karlson) (09/21/90)
In 20404@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU, he mentioned that the Norton Disk Doctor noticed bad sectors in the IBMIO.SYS file and moved them. I think this was almost certainly a mistake. While it is the case that DOS for different machines can be a little different (a wonderful notion for a machine independent OS), I believe that it is universally true that the BIOS file on bootable disks MUST be located in contiguous sectors at the begining of the Disk Data Area. I don't know exactly what NDD did when it moved them in terms of changing reserved sectors and so forth, but from the sound of it, it didn't know that it was dealing with a special file that needed a special location on the disk. SPINRITE seems to be a very thorough piece of software, but if it was given a disk that had its bootable files messed with I can't see how it would correct for that. You might want to try saving all the files on your harddisk to some other (secure) medium and then reformating the disk so that the special files are placed back in the right areas and the formatter can set up the disk to correctly handle those sectors that are bad. Off-hand, I can't think of any other way to deal with the situation. Eric Karlson
mjlst3@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Mikes Magik Shoppe) (09/21/90)
In article <20404@orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> duvalj@bionette.cgrb.orst.edu (Joe Duval) writes: >Netters, >Norton's Disk Doctor and it did find bad blocks in the space where IBMIO.SYS >was on the disk. I had it fix (move) them. Was that a mistake? And it found >about 7 other bad blocks on the disk that it wanted to mark bad and move the Since the damage has already been done, boot from floppy (being sure that it is the version that you currently have on your pc), run the Norton Disk Doctor again, select Common Solutions, select Make disk bootable select Drive C Assuming that there are enough good blocks to write the system programs, this should take care of the problem. If not, I have heard that spinwrite can do a non destructive low level format and make bad blocks good again, if this is the case, have it do that and then run NDD again. Michael J. LeWinter -- All email, no cute messages to mankind : mjl@vms.cis.pitt.edu mjl@pittvms.bitnet