Hello, Wayne.    I'm glad to see your posting dated today.

-=> WAYNE CHIRNSIDE wrote to ALL <=-


 WC> This drive passed scandisk every time it ran.

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.

Congratulations!  But please don't give up on your "troubleshooting" and
throw away that "bad drive" which passed Scandisk every time just yet.
This is the drive with 300K plus of bad sectors, right?  Plz see msg
from Matt McC from some weeks ago, which I tried to forward to you today
from the Neverending BBS as a reminder and before I saw this post from
you.  Sorry, although I was talking to you, I accidentally left Matt
as the adressee when I tried to edit and 'forward' it to you.

I forget who your drive mfgr is, but Matt said they had a utility which
will "zero it out"  (sometimes referred to as a pseudo-low level
format).  If you would go thru that, then FDISK and reformat, then maybe
use mfgr utility (if they have one) which will do a destructive
read-write test over the drive, - -  if it will pass both of those, it
has actually been a good drive all the time,  and maybe due to some
virus or something, it had a corrupted and continuing corruption going
on in its FAT entries.

 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.

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



 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 ;-)

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

Good luck. - - -  JimH.
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