Win98se Scandisk Blunder!

Hello all,

I think I made a blunder. Need some advice.

I was given a used 60gb Hd for my laptop. I have a bootable Cdrom that will allow me to run Win98se's partition, format, and scandisk on a blank HD in DOS without any other OS like 98se loaded (much like the Win98se boot diskette). Not knowing that the 98se scandisk won't work on drives over 35gb on systems with Pheniox bios, I ran it on a Pheniox and it started displaying cluster after cluster as being bad half way thru. I have since upgraded to WinXP. The 60gb HD has been sitting on my bench for a while. I am now wanting to use the HD. Before I do, I need to know a few things. First, are the clusters that 98se reported falsely as being bad a perminate part of the drive now? Is there any way of erasing the errors? If all of the bad clusters are false, will WinXP fix or ignore them?

I know little as to how scandisk works or how it stores the errors (bad cluster reports), or where. I would like to use this 60gb drive in my new laptop (new to me anyway), but am refusing to do much with it until someone who knows more than me about this situation advises me as to what I might do next.

OGPIM

 

Reply

Steve,

I spent half the night last night doing exactly that. Here is what I did and what has happened:

First, I tried to repartition and set c:\ at 100%. Then I reformated in NTFS. The first time I chose a full Format and it locked up at 53%. I waited for 1/2 hour and finally rebooted and tried format in 'quick mode'. This passed with no problems.
After putting XP on, I right clicked on the C:\ drive in My Computer and selected Tools and the check disk option. (selecting both options) I rebooted the system and let Chkdsk run and in step 5, it locked up at 48%.

I pulled out my Fdisk and repartitioned into 4 equal drives, formated each in Fat32, and although there were some bad sectors in each partition, it didn't lock up durring format. I went back in and deleted everything once again and made 1 partition, and once again formatted in Fat32, and once again had no problems with lock-up.

I then re-installed XP and ran the Chkdsk tool, and once again it locked up at 47%.

I once again have the drive benched, although it seems fine, until I figure out why it locks up durring chkdsk.

XP, Chkdsk, Fdisk, & Format all see 58gb's on the 60gb harddrive.

Opinions????

OGPIM

 

Try doing a single pass low level format with KillDisk then run FDISK and format it to the file system you want (FAT32/NTFS). Also run the manufacturer's disk utility on it.

Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities

 

Reply

Whiskeyman:

Tried that DiskKill. Only gave me more questions that I have to investigate.

DiskKill found 2 bad sectors. Gave me the sector numbers each time, gave me 'error 128' for each, and told me to 'check drive geometry'. There are no tools available on the freeware version. Also, a true low level format routine is not available on DiskKill.

I have a Toshiba 60g HD. Went to their website and am unable to locate any tools for their dirves, such as a low level format routine. I am not familar enough with this manufacturer to know if there is a different manufacturer's format routine that will work on this drive. If I could just get the drive to ignore the suspect sectors, I think the drive will be usable.

The good news is that after it found these bad sectors, I chose the ignore option (after the retry option did nothing) and it made it the rest of the way through the drive without incident. I ran Fdisk, formatted and loaded XP without incident. The bad news is that when I ran the XP chkdsk and selected the 'scan for bad sectors and repair' option, it once again locked up.

This MAY be the stupidest question yet, but I have to ask. Since I am using an older IBM thinkpad, i series-mod 1300, is it possibible that the BIOS is not up to date enough to handle the higher capacity HD's? It's bad enough that the CPU speed (700Mhz) is so slow that it took DiskKill 4-1/2 hours to run. I am curious. I don't mess with my BIOS unless someone who knows better tells me to.

I appreciate the link to DiskKill, and if you have any other suggestions, I'll appreciate it.

OGPIM

 

That laptop's Bios may very well not recognize that newer HDD. Toshiba doesn't have their own disk utility. They recommend using software from Ontrack.