I receive "The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad block."

G

Guest

I have been receiving "The device, \Device\Harddisk1\D, has a bad block." in
the event viewer. I shut down the machine and still receive the exact same
message despite the drives listed in the system being "C, E and F". How do I
fix this?
 
G

Guest

Your "D" drive should be your CD-Rom and/or DVD-Rom drive. If you have a
disk in it, remove it and reboot. Click My Computer and check under Devices
with removable storage if your CD drive is listed. If not, your cable may be
disconnected or the drive needs to be reinstalled.
 
G

Guest

Yup allready though of that... drive F is actually the DVD drive. Drive D
was there, I shut down and disconneted the IDE and power from it 3 days ago.
Still getting the error posted however. Suspect it may be due to bios or
something. Drive C is a Seagate, Drive E is a Western Digital and F is an HP
DVD Burner.
 
F

frodo

Don't be deceived by the "D" in the listing, it's not your D: drive. It
says HardDisk1, so that's the second physical hard disk drive (not
partition) detected (HardDisk0 is first detected, HardDisk1 is second,
etc), which is probably the one on the secondary ide controller. Note it
should know the diff between a "HardDisk" and a "CD Disk", so it's not an
optical drive, it's a drive that XP considers a "Hard Disk".

My guess: you've got an IDE-based Zip drive, don't you? XP thinks of IDE
ZIP disks as HardDisks. That's the culprit, and it's common. It
typically means the disk (not the drive) is developing errors. Get all
the data off the disk and reformat it, a LONG format, not a short one.
This will find and map-out the bad sectors. When done, do a Properties on
the drive, and click the Iomega tab, then click Disk Info; it'll tell ya
the "life expectancy" of the disk. [Assumes you have the IomegaWare
driver installed, which is not absolutly required. If you don't have it
then there will not be an Iomega tab.]

A dead givaway to a ZIP disk problem is hearing the drive make a loud
click noise - that's it resetting the head servo motor, which it does when
it encounters a read error. Usually it does it 2 or 3 times in a row.
This is often called "The Click of Death"! On (much) older zip drives
this often was a prelude to the drive actually destroying/eating the
inserted disk, but that problem is fairly rare today.

General recommendation w/ ZIP disks: never eject the disk via the button
on the drive, instead use the right-click | eject command. This allows
the software to always "know" the disk is being ejected and to close it
out cleanly.

-----------------

If you don't have a ZIP disk, well then "never mind"!

Open Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc), it'll point out to you which drive is
Disk 1.

And search the Knowledge Base for "Bad Block" and "Delayed Write Fail"
 
G

Guest

Well unfortunately no zip drive. Started with drive0 seagate, drive1 seagate
(getting errors), and drive2 Western digital. I disconnected drive1 and of
course the western digital took over not only the drive1 lable but also the
drive1 errors.
 
F

frodo

Mitius said:
Well unfortunately no zip drive. Started with drive0 seagate, drive1 seagate
(getting errors), and drive2 Western digital. I disconnected drive1 and of
course the western digital took over not only the drive1 lable but also the
drive1 errors.

very very wierd! you disconnected the drive, and left that interface
unconnected, and the error moved!

Were the second seagate and the WD the master and slave on the same
controller? If so I'd say the controller is bad, or the cable. Is it an
80-wire cable (blue connector at motherboard end, black and grey at drive
ends)? When running higer DMA modes you must have an 80-wire cable (40
pins, but 80 wires). Ensure the cables are well seated. If this error is
recent, and all was well before for a long time, I'd suspect the
controller is failing. Is system running hot? Is power supply from a
"good" manufacturuer? Both could cause slow degradation and intermittant
errors. Also memory; you could try running memtest86+ from a floppy and
let it run for a few hours; should return ZERO errors if all is well;
even 1 error is not good.

Diagnosing this sort of thing can be very hard. and frustrating. think
hard about what has changed recently. do the standard maintenance things
(virus scan, spy scan, clean out dust in pc, check all fans, reseat
everything, etc).

Perhaps time to shop for a new motherboard! If system is more than 2
years old then it was time anyway...

$200 buys a new AMD 64 motherboard and fast processor these days; even
less if ya go Semperon. Mem runs about $40 if you need it, new Antec box
w/ power supply runs $65. Keep all your other parts if they're good.

Good Luck!
 
G

Guest

I, too recently had a bad block of memory error. I had to look in my log file
in the admin site to find the problem. Then, somewhere it said the problem
could be from a driver installed. This happened when I was trying to
"Activate" Microsoft Office 2003 that I had downloaded just to open an Excel
document my wife had gotten emailed to her. ( uuuggghhhn).

Ran Check Disk---said it fixed the prob, but it did not.
Deleted MS Office.
Restored computer to 3 days before install of Office.
Cleaned it out.
Ran Check Disk again---said it fixed the problem.
Ran NOrton Disk fixer---it said there were no problems now.
Seems to be ok, but nervous about it all.

Anybody know if or why the MS OFFIce would do this? And did I really
fix it or just muck it up more?
thanks
gmardre
 

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