🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <821216852snz@inf-eden.demon.co.uk>
           cjk@inf-eden.demon.co.uk "Chris Kennington" writes:

>     But I was NOT attempting to reclaim bad sectors!  These carried
> through from before to after.  What's the problem with a few bad
> sectors, if their number is not increasing?

Most IDE drives have a number of "spare" sectors on each 
cylinder, and they automatically relocate data from a developing 
bad sector to a spare sector. This happens transparently to the 
user and DOS, and is handled by the drive's firmware.

Therefore, if bad sectors start appearing to DOS, it implies that
the disk's spare sectors have been used and that severe damage
has occurred. Basically, I would be *very* wary of using an IDE
drive that shows bad sectors and continues to do so after a DOS
format. This is the voice of experience speaking -- I repair 100+
PCs a month in the course of my job as a bench technician.

IDE drives *can* be "low level" formatted by an utility that
understands the features of such a drive and will just clear 
sectors, rather than attempt to perform a proper format. Early 
utilities, like QAPlus, were lethal to early IDE drives, such as 
the Seagate ST351A/X, as they performed a low-level format which 
the drive's firmware did not block, and therefore wrecked them.

Such IDE-aware utilities can be valuable: this week, I recovered
a Maxtor 240M IDE drive with multiple, random bad sectors using 
DrivePro. After "low level formatting", the drive returned zero 
bad sectors and despite torture testing, has yet to fail. I 
suspect that perhaps the power connector to the drive may have 
been loose while it was installed in the original PC, causing 
intermittent write fails, and making the drive's firmware map 
out sectors unnecessarily.  A true bad sector will usually 
remain bad, despite the best attempts of DrivePro and SpinRite.

Finally, another cause of bad sectors occurring randomly (rather 
than in contiguous blocks, shown in Scandisk /surf or Norton, 
etc.) could possibly be a virus. Some viruses (virii?) hide in 
bad sectors, and I would strongly recommend the use of a decent 
virus scanner to check out such a drive. Recommended product: Dr.
Solly's, based upon experience. Good Net reviews: F-Prot. Avoid: 
Ms Anti-Virus included with MsDOS, IBM Anti-Virus included with 
PcDOS. Mixed reviews: Norton Anti Virus.

-- 
Mike Tomlinson