On Tue, 9 May 2006 02:34:02 -0700, Evils Dark
Ok, I cannot guarentee the HD is failing, but every time Win 98's Scandisk
was run, it found more and more bad sectors it could not write too.
To me, that *guarantees* the HD is failing. Geez, how much more clue
do you need? This is as unsubtle a heads-up as a shotgun rammed in
your mouth and "I AM GOING TO KILL YOU!!" shouted in your ear ;-)
Jeff asks a good question; is this a failing HD or just file system
corruption? The answer is, it is a failing HD.
File system corruption is tackled first by Scandisk, before the
surface scan starts, and (with the absurd exception of "mismatched
FAT", given that can be the most dangerous type of corruption) it will
abort rather than proceed to surface scan if not allowed to "fix".
So by the time you reach the surface scan, you are pretty sure that
file system corruption is no longer an issue.
If Scandisk (or any other process that accesses the HD) encounters a
failing sector, it will be delayed by loops of retries. This does
sometimes happen during the first phase of Scandisk, when failing
sectors are hit during the file system analysis and repair. If you
wait long enough, Scandisk will advise you to do a surface scan when
prompted, as it's "aware" there are bad sectors about.
File system corruption doesn't cause Scandisk to lock up, though it
may appear to loop endlessly through "looking for crosslinked chains".
Scandisk is built to detect and manage file system corruption, even if
this may cause "normal" software activities to crash or hang.
It's all good to know CHKDSK is every bit as useless as I though it was.
Both Scandisk and ChkDsk are useless if used for the wrong purposes;
using them to recover data is worse than trying to eat tea with a
spoon, it's more like looking for spilled petrol by candlelight.
Scandisk is less useless than ChkDsk for what it is designed to do,
because at least you are interactively in control of the situation.
"Hey, the Windows directory looks wrong, should I delete it?" 'No.'
ChkDsk dates from DOS 5, and it is not interactive. You either don't
let it fix anything (in which case it can report false errors if the
volume is in use) or you have to unmuzzle it and let it off the leash
to blindly "fix" whatever it wants to, without being prompted for
permission first. "Hey, your Windows directory looked wrong, so I
deleted it. No, I didn't keep any Undo info, why do you ask?".
Unfortunately, ChkDsk is the ONLY file system repair tool for NTFS.
So what do you use to repair a drive?!
You cannot "repair" a physically dying HD, which is what you are
dealing with here. You can fake it, though... as you might want to
do, if (a) it's not your data, and (b) you'd have to bear the support
and replacement costs as per warranty. Join the dots from there.
You can repair a damaged file system, once you know the hard drive is
physically OK and the hardware you are working in (RAM, etc.) is also
sound - things that are in doubt, when the file system gets barfed.
You get auto-fixing things like ChkDsk /F, which are dangerous unless
you do a full raw image backup of the entire volume first (not fun, if
the whole HD is one big C
. This is because once things are "fixed",
you lose the cues to detect what was corrupted and how one might be
able to fix this. Typically, these tools look for conflicting
information, then guess which is right and "correct" the other.
You get interactive tools that do the same thing, like Scandisk,
Norton Disk Doctor, and the startup phase of DiskEdit. These check
for errors and either ask if you want it to fix them, or (in the case
of DiskEdit) let you tackle them manually. Again, it's best to
prepare an Undo first, tho this way you know what you are doing
because it is you that is doing it. Keep a log of what's done.
You get tools that do not make any changes to the drive at all, but
will try to find and copy off damaged data. That's a very good safe
approach, as it keeps things unmuddied e.g. in case you need to call
in recovery techs etc. for the rest.
Then you get tools like HD Tune that ignore file systems completely,
don't trry to fix anything, but just tell you if the physical HD is
OK. All of the above tools have their place.
Just some points: XP COULD access D: before I ran CHKDSK,
then it required formatting. I did not access the drive in XP after.
That is not comforting news.
Too late, the drive was taken off the old an in the new.
I have not tried writing to it.
I tried cquirke's link, but it says the project is disbanded or something
Eh? Lemmie see...
http://www.hdtune.com/
....looks OK, leads to a download page without changing the URL in the
address bar (spooky, that) and I just downloaded all 175k of it again.
WFM. Oh wait, did you mean Odi's LFN Tools? Yes, he's not continuing
development, but they have been handed over to Source Forge if you
want to do so yourself, and they are still available to download as
runnable programs for those of us who don't code.
Let me check that again, tho... it links to...
http://lfntools.sourceforge.net/
....and the download looks like it works. Again, it Works For Me.
Malke, I wish i knew of that program when I deleted a whole heap of files
accidently with no backup.
That's another story, different tools for that; I still use Norton's
UnErase (a companion of DiskEdit - which I also use - being one of the
last parts of modern "Norton" with some roots in Peter N's era).
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