-=> JIM HOLSONBACK wrote to WAYNE CHIRNSIDE <=-
 
 WC> This drive passed scandisk every time it ran.

 JH> Plz see below.

 WC> Swapped drives, against the advise of some including myself
 WC> but at this point having no computer and only risking
 WC> a 325 Meg. Seagate...
 WC> Bingo! Problem solved.

 JH> Congratulations!  But please don't give up on your
"troubleshooting"
 JH> and throw away that "bad drive" which passed Scandisk
every time just
 JH> yet. This is the drive with 300K plus of bad sectors, right?  
 
Nah, just my error in assuming Quantum meant 6.4 Meg. as in
1,024/K instead of the 1000/K value they were using.
A bit misleading that and I drew the wrong conclusion from
it. Running scandisk it has _no_ bad sectors.

 JH> Plz see
 JH> msg from Matt McC from some weeks ago, which I tried to forward to you
 JH> today from the Neverending BBS as a reminder and before I saw this post
 JH> from you.  Sorry, although I was talking to you, I accidentally left
 JH> Matt as the adressee when I tried to edit and 'forward' it to you.

We all make mistakes and I make enough for several people.

 JH> I forget who your drive mfgr is, but Matt said they had a utility which
 JH> will "zero it out"  (sometimes referred to as a pseudo-low level
 JH> format).  
 
Familiar with those, they remap the drive too using extra sectors
so the drive can be restored to pristine condition.
Tried one of those utilities on a Western Digital drive to no
avail, too many errors. Don't believe it would 
accomplish anythng with the Quantum drive as it appears
an electronics problem on the drives circuit board.
Running a *nix based RAM test that tried EVERY combination
of bits in each byte of RAM gave me plenty of time to _listen_
to the drive with the drive never doing a write and locking up
the system. 
The drive is rather quiet especially with the fan 
running so it took me a while to pick up on what sounds
were telling me. Well it sounds like the arm with the heads
is traveling to the end of it's reach, drive spinning down,
drive spinning up, repeat for up to three times at which point
the hard drive activity light latches on and nothing short
of powering down will change that!
That said I did not dispose of the drive and may well
check out Quantum's web site for such a utility for this drive
however my expectations are minimal for a fix here.
Nothing to lose by trying however.

 JH> If you would go thru that, then FDISK and reformat, then
 JH> maybe use mfgr utility (if they have one) which will do a destructive
 JH> read-write test over the drive, - -  if it will pass both of those, it
 JH> has actually been a good drive all the time,  and maybe due to some
 JH> virus or something, it had a corrupted and continuing corruption going
 JH> on in its FAT entries.

 I've already fdisked and formatted the drive twice but have not used
 the write all zero's utility as of yet.

 WC> So as I was planning on buying a new large drive anyway I
 WC> see this as a zero cost win - win and I've got a nice
 WC> little machine.

 JH> Unless your recent vet-bills for the dog have depleted your $$ for
 JH> your planned HDD upgrade, you may want to take a look at fliers in
 JH> tomorrow Sunday newspaper.  Little birdie (www.techbargains.com) told
 JH> me there may be some good buys on HDD in there.  Staples, finally, but
 JH> also be sure to look at CompUSA, since BIR they have a store near you
 JH> also.

Near enough and it's a straight shot by bus which is a big deal
for me. Saw some good prices in my surfing last night but of course
running 16 bit Netscape 4.08 over Win 3.1 a lot of these
retailers web pages don't display properly. The dog's vet bill 
true did keep me from obtaining a drive last month but I'm good
to go in two weeks and might even try a 168 pin generic 128 Meg.
DIMM in this machine next month as well as there were also some 
good prices on those.

 WC> I look forward to accessing my CD-ROM and 50K
 WC> modem once I reload Windows 98 but am currently
 WC> running Win 3.1 on a Celeron 433 with 96 Meg RAM
 WC> and 3,800 RPM 14.5 seek time 325 Meg. drive ;-)

 JH> Just a suggestion - - even if you are able to purchase your dream HDD
 JH> for a bargain price tomorrow, you might want to wait a few days to
 JH> verify stability with your current setup before you go to changing HDD
 JH> and installing all the partitions and software I know you want to put
 JH> on there. After all, this system worked pretty well for awhile for you,
 JH> before something in there started gradually and progressively shi**ing
 JH> in your mess-kit.

I've got a built in 2 week economic waiting period and yes that thought
had occured to me as well.
I did write individual thank you notes to all the principles
involved in helping me solve this unfortunately I was so tired
when I'd gotten the system up and running I set the wrong system date 
and fido mailers promptly dispensed with them so I offerered
up the single thanks to all message having already deleted
the prior qwk.rep
 
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