Defragmenting Hard Drive leads to destruction

I am running Win ME, and everything was hunky dory (sp?) until I tried to defrag my hard drive. I used Norton's Speed Disk. It went to about 18% then locked up. I tried to restart, but hard drive would cooperate. Dell's tech support ended up replacing the IDE PCI card.

Next, I tried again to defrag with Speed Disk. Same thing! Instead of replacing card again, I plugged hard drive directly into motherboard.

Now, I try to learn from mistakes, so when I try to defrag again, I use Disk Defragmenter. SAME thing. Hard drive fails to boot. Get some messages about the FAT32 being gone. I try some things (prayer and sacrifices mostly) and voila! The drive magically comes back. By this time my drive is 59% fragmented.

Please, does anyone have any idea what in heaven's name is going on here. I am have an 80 GB 5400 rpm drive. I am planning on replacing the drive if I can figure nothing else out. Thanks in advance

lovkel

 

Welcome to WindowsBBS!

I'd suggest using Scandisk first and let it do a full surface scan. You might rent a movie to watch while it's running, but this will at least verify that the drive itself is in good order.

 

I used Norton's Speed Disk.

Did you have the proper vesion of Norton ? If not you can have problems.

As a suggestion only from my experience. Once you get the HD fixed up DO NOT use Norton Speed Disk, or System Doctor with Win98 ME

They will fight with stuff that ME loads and may be running in the background and will almost destory a HD.

I would suggest now that you boot from a floppy with CRDOM support and run Norton DiskDoctor with Surface Check for DOS from the NU folder of the Norton CD.

I used to be a big fan of Norton Utilities but am no longer.

The only thing I use from NU now is WinDoctor, DiskDoctor FROM DOS if needed. And I am back to the Original Win98.

BillyBob

 

addendum

Agre with BillyBob, but also many people do not HAVE access to Norton Utilities.
For many years I was totally totaly against it.
Was a great program, unfortunately I have seen some idiots get ahold of it, and not know ing what they were doing, totally destroyed hdd like crazy. Then asked for help because they did not know what they were doing, But that is besides the point...

Try this, IF you do not Have NU, just boot from a boot Floppy, does not matter version, Windows 98, 98 SE, ME, whatever, boot from the floppy.

At the A:\ DOS prompt, scandisk c:\ surface, or which ever hard drive it is that is giving you problems..

Reason why... If you try scandisk while in Windows, there are many many other progs wanting to run in the background, and these will interupt scandisk while Windows is running.
Scandisk in DOS, runs exclusive, and you CAN'T run other progs at the same time.
At any rate, go take in a long movie, and forget the computer for a long time.... until it is done.

 

The problem being discussed is one VERY GOOD REASON to keep the C: drive size down to a max of 1,9gig.

Scandisk and defrag complete quicker. And VERY, VERY seldom ( if ever ) do we have problems with partitions other then C: where the OS is.

Fragmentation is also kept down.

And from my experience there seems to be less screwups with the smaller C: drive size.

Also, unless things have changed or I am wrong, any partition larger then 8gig WASTES a tremendous amount of space due to cluster size.

If I am wrong about the partiton size please correct me as things do change.

BillyBob

 

Here's the chart for FAT32, and for NTFS if anyone is curious.

Code:

[size=2]                     [b]FAT32 CLUSTER SIZE[/b]

Cluster Size   Minimum Partition Size   Maximum Partition Size

   4 KB                 0.5 GB                   8 GB
   8 KB                 8 GB                    16 GB
  16 KB                16 GB                    32 GB
  32 KB                32 GB                    64 GB


                     [b]NTFS CLUSTER SIZE[/b]

Cluster Size   Minimum Partition Size   Maximum Partition Size

   0.5 KB               0 GB                     0.5 GB
   1 KB                 0.5 GB                   1 GB
   2 KB                 1 GB                     2 GB
   4 KB                 2 GB                     4 GB
   8 KB                 4 GB                     8 GB
  16 KB                 8 GB                    16 GB
  32 KB                16 GB                    32 GB
  64 KB                32 GB                    64 GB[/size]

 

Hello Again - and thanks for the posts; however things are only getting weirder!

I ran Norton 2001 Disk Doctor and was told everything was fine. I had decided some funky thing I didn't understand was wrong and I would wipe and start over. On advice from a previous post I ran scandisk from outside of WinME. It STOPPED and my hard drive hiccuped like it had when I tried to defrag it from inside WinME.

I used Dell's Diagnostic CD and it told me that it found an error in the real time clock and said something about a crystal (I am shamed to admit I didn't write it down). When I ran the test again, I did NOT get a repeat of the message.

I ran extended tests on the drive from the Dell Diagnostic CD - it said the drive was fine.

So my question, after much babbling, is "Is this a problem with my motherboard or hard drive?" Another good question I would love to have answered cuz I aint got me 'nuff of that there 'puter know-how is "Is it possible for software to destroy hard ware? "

PLEASE! Any ideas welcome. Would especially like recommendations on what is more effective on PC repair: radial arm saw or jig saw?

lovkel

 

Hi lovkel,
Well the first thing I thought about was the "system restore" feature in ME. Not having used ME, it was just a SWAG. You having run scandisk from a boot floppy eliminates that guess.

Don't know anything about Dell's HDD diag. util. but have used diag. util. from HDD manufactuters, i.e. Seagate, Maxtor, and WD. All provided an accurate answer to my problems. These utilities are available on their respective websites.

Concerning the use of scandisk, are you running a "standard scan" or thorough scan "? I had a used IBM drive that displayed similar symptoms (unable to complete a reformat or standard scan) and when I ran a "thorough scan" the on screen progress graphic looked as if it had been hit with a shot gun it had so many bad sectors.

HTH,
Tin

 

I'm pretty sure I ran a thourough scan. I don't I was offered the option though. As I recall, I ran scandisk and it asked if I wanted to run a surface check. I said yes and away it slowly chugged. It got to about 25% completion before going south. Up to that point there were no bad blocks.