🚀 go-pugleaf

I'll attest to the worthiness of Norton's DT and NU utilities!

A while back I inadvertantly deleted every file on my AT's hard disk
(don't ask).  It took about two days with NU to recover the 150 or 200
files that I didn't have backup copies of (there were about 1800
files on the disk).  I chalked the rest off as a long-needed clean-up.
Anyway, the drive had been giving me numerous problems up until that
time.  I put all the recovered files on floppy, then reformatted the
hard disk, and finally ran DT on it to mark the bad clusters.
(DT will mark clusters as unusable only if they are not currently
in use by a file; otherwise, it just tells you what cluster has a problem
and does nothing about it.  Also, DOS provides for marking bad "clusters",
not "sectors".  On a typical hard disk, there might be four 512-byte sectors
in a 2K-byte cluster.  A 20M hard disk then has about 11,000 clusters.)
DT found and marked fifteen bad clusters on the first try.  Everything
ran smoothly after that for about 6 months.  Then, about a week or so
ago, errors started cropping up again.  I ran DT again and it located
four new bad clusters (it took about five passes to catch all four).

Anyway, I think I'll start running DT once every week or two.
While the cluster failure rate on this hard disk is ridiculous, at least
DT keeps me aware of how fast it's degrading and prevents DOS from using
the bad areas.  The only problems with it are [1] it doesn't always
spot a cluster that's marginally bad, so you end up having to run DT
several times before you become satisfied that they've all been found,
and [2] if DT finds a bad cluster that's currently in use by a file, I have
yet to see it pin down the name of the file, although it does do a "file
read check" that appears to try to do just that.  You do get the number of
the cluster that's bad, but then I've always had to manually figure out
what file sector that is and work backwards from the data that's there
to determine what file it's in.  Then I (save, if possible, and) delete the
file, and then run DT again.

bill frolik
hp-pcd!bill