HardDrive Problems.

Dave

As of late [the last 3 days] i have been having a few problems with my laptop [Compaq Armada, Running WIN98 64mb of RAM, PIII 600]

The PC is crashing constantly when 3 more more windows open, when i reboot scandisk runs as always, but it stops at 4%, giving me an error 5mins later saying something about FAT being corrupt and it can't fix the error. So i get past that and i try to run Win Scandisk, the PC crashes. I have been told that it is a HardDrive problem. No odd sound are coming from the HardDrive [yet]. A reformat would be a last option until the week after next.

Anyhelp would be appreciated.

Cheers.

-Dave

phobos

irish,

About a year ago my laptop started this lark of telling me there was something wrong with my FAT file system when windows tried to boot. To be more specific it said my VFAT had become corrupt (Virtual File Allocation Table). Once that blue screen msg was presented, all I could do was manually power off the computer. When I would restart the system after that I would be plonked in DOS. If I tried to launch windows from there the same thing would happen. So I said to myself it's obviously a Windows thing. So to save myself time and frustration I re-installed Win98 over my current installation and hey presto it worked again. Brushing the problem under the carpet I know. But the difference is that when I did physical scans of the disk, it said there was nothing wrong.

Alas this problem occured 3 times in the space of a year, and now my system won't boot at all. The BIOS won't even detect the HD. So it's obviously knackered.

You said you don't want to format the disk, so you could simply try and re-install the OS. All files on your machine will stay the same, but a fresh version of the OS will be added over your existing one.

Give it a go...

;-phobos-)

_CreeD_

Bite the bullet and wipe it clean, preferably with a low level format util first.

It is HDD corruption and probably happens after a bit of usage due to your swap file running into it.

Renton

DO NOT Low level format the drive, you could damage it... Format it, thats a better idea

RentZ

Magwitch

If you have the option of starting in DOS mode exit scan disk before it reaches 4%. At least from DOS you may be able to rescue some data onto floppy. I don't know if it will work, but maybe.

Stephen

What's the difference between a format and a low-level format ?

Gerry

indeed, do not low level format the drive. Modern drives have what is called embedded servo. On every track there is some data which lets the mechanism work out which track it is reading. A low level format will erase this, destroying your drive. Read more here:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/op/actServo.html

anyway, an ordinary format of your drive will detect any bad sectors and mark them as bad, so no data will be stored in them. If your machine still doesn't work properly after this, the drive is obviously finished.

more about low level formatting here:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/geom/formatLow.html



[This message has been edited by Gerry (edited 08-07-2001).]

Kegser

There is really no reason to perform any kind of "low-level format" on the drive; that's almost like curing a bandy toenail by chopping off the entire limb.

At any rate, modern drives will not benefit from any kind of low-level format; as the complexity of modern drives makes the procedure virtually useless.

The only thing you might be doing is completely erasing the data on the drive by using a 'fill' program which essentially fills the drive with 0's; essentially returning it to a clean slate as opposed to a regular 'format' command which doesn't actually physically remove the data from every single sector.

***Dammit Gerry, always getting in just before me.***



[This message has been edited by Kegser (edited 08-07-2001).]

_CreeD_

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Kegser:
There is really no reason to perform any kind of "low-level format" on the drive; that's almost like curing a bandy toenail by chopping off the entire limb.
</font>

Actually Ive had it fix drives that couldn't be fdisked let alone formatted. But if it destroys newer-drive info then ...oops....

SickBoy

Low level formats can indeed be run on HDDs(even newer HDDs) providing you have the vendor specific software for your hardware.

Gerry

to be honest sb, it won't do anything more than a high level format and a zero fill. A proper low level format erases everything, tracks and sectors, and redefines them. On modern drives this has to be done by special machines on the platters, before the drives are assembled. Theres no need for the low level format now.

SickBoy

Well I used to test HDDs in here(Dell) and it was a big no no to test one vendor drive with another vendors software. They said it would destroy the drive(I've seen this when I said to myself, lets see what will happen for the laugh..) because incorrect data would be written to the disk... This was all changed after they made the software detect the drive and if it was from a different vendor the software wouldn't run.
It did a lot more than just write 0's to the disk anyways.

Kegser

Mainly I was trying to get the point across that someone who doesn't know what they're doing should not be ****ing about with their drives. Especially when the only problem is a ropey FAT.

Gerry

ok, I'm not going to pretend I know very much about this, all I was trying to say was that these vendor specific formatting tools (more than likely) do not erase the definition of where the tracks and sectors are on the disk, but I'm sure they do everything short of that.

_CreeD_

Well the last time I remember doing this was a year ago using WD-Diag from western digital and it was easier to setup and run than Fdisk. The drive would have been an Ata-66 Quantum of some description.

Dave

Well the problem was fixed without formatting or anything. Putting

Device=C:\Windows\Ifshlp.sys

into my config.sys sorted the whole thing.

Cheers for the advice and help lads, even though i didn't have to use it.

-Dave