Hi, Matt.

Back on 2/10, we were talking to Wayne C. about - -

 JH> One way you could do some more checking on it would be to run
 JH> Scandisk a few more times.  If more bad clusters keep showing up,
 JH> that is a bad sign.

 MM> And if I may add...  IF Scandisk does NOT find additional bad sectors,
 MM> the ones marked as "bad" _may_ have been due to illegal
FAT entries,
 MM> ie: pointing to sectors that do not exist on the drive.  The "factory
 MM> program" for that drive has the ability to zero out the entire drive,
 MM> FAT included, as well as finding and marking 'true' bad sectors.  Then
 MM> run Scandisk a few more times for good luck.  If no errors are found,
 MM> you just might have a 'good' drive.

I had apparent success with one of those yesterday.  Maxtor 2.1GB,
salvaged from on its way to the "junkman".  Found with a sticker on it
saying "run LL".  I dunno if our director tried that.

I used a Win98 rescue diskette - C: was not accessible, due to "invalid
media".  I used FDISK to remove partition which was on there, make a new
one, and tried FORMAT C: /u/s.  That stumbled repeatedly and badly over
trying to recover bad clusters, and FORMAT finally gave up and
terminated itself.

I then went to a bootable diskette with Maxtor's "PowerMax" utilities on
it.  Ran the "Write Disk Pack (low level format)" utility to write
zeroes all over the drive.  Then ran "Advanced Test (Factory
Recertification)" - so far so good.  Then back to the Win98 diskette -
used FDISK again, and retried FORMAT - - this time with success - and NO
bad clusters.  I then did a total of 15 passes with the "Burn-In test",
with no problems found.  The Maxtor software now says the drive is
"certified error-free".  :-).  Final test - ran 2 passes with SCANDISK,
found no bad clusters.

One thing I don't quite understand is how the first use if FDISK to make
a new partition failed to do any good - -  maybe it didn't clear out the
bad FAT?

So maybe the only problem the drive had was from a virus attack?


Back to Wayne's drive -  he has now reported that it repeatedly spins up
and spins down.  BIR from a question here or in the HDD conference some
time back,  that is a symptom which can be caused by a bad controller
board?

- - -  JimH.

... Roadkill?! Heck, Jim, lets go back- that critter is still _alive_ -Bubba
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