Scandisk won't analyze surface - HELP!

[John Crankshaw]

A problem I've never seen before on my W98 system:

Started during normal processing -- hard drive starts seeking and re-seeking
(clicking) endlessly and I must reboot.

Tried to find the error with scandisk surface analysis, but it gets to
sector 32007 and hangs endlessly, too, clicking away. Always 32007.

Does this smell like corruption or a surface problem?

I'd like to try a fix before trying to reformat.

John

 

[maggot]

A problem I've never seen before on my W98 system:

Started during normal processing -- hard drive starts seeking and re-seeking
(clicking) endlessly and I must reboot.

Tried to find the error with scandisk surface analysis, but it gets to
sector 32007 and hangs endlessly, too, clicking away. Always 32007.

Does this smell like corruption or a surface problem?

I'd like to try a fix before trying to reformat.

John

The HDD manufacturer should have a utiltity you can download from
their website that can check the drive from a dos bootdisk.

 

[John Crankshaw]

Good suggestion. I downloaded Hitachi's Disk Fitness Program. It seems to
have fixed the corrupted sectors. No consequences yet!

Thanks.

 

[TE Cheah]

| I'd like to try a fix before trying to reformat.

My Seagate ata66 hdd has the same problem, I moved all data to
another partition then formatted this partition, no use. 1 needs to
at least delete & reset partition.
Win98se's scandisk & defrag are damn slow ( ½ as fast as Win
ME's ).

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

| I'd like to try a fix before trying to reformat.

My Seagate ata66 hdd has the same problem, I moved all data to
another partition then formatted this partition, no use. 1 needs to
at least delete & reset partition.

Makes very little difference. You need to overwrite the hanging
sector(s). Fdisk will write to 1 or 2 per every track so it is sheer
luck if you hit the hanging (unrecoverable read error bad) sector.

Win98se's scandisk & defrag are damn slow ( ½ as fast as Win
ME's ).

But one can grab the ME one and use it on 98.