I do not know enough about viruses to rule that out, but
if you get a speck of dirt in your drive (or there is flaking
of the magnetic medium), then you can get progressive
degeneration as more and more of the magnetic medium
is destroyed in a plowing action.  If it is not a virus, then
the disk is probably bad and may be replaced under
warranty.

Dean Kukral

-----Original Message-----
From: Mansoor Butt <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, August 07, 1998 10:15 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Bad Clusters eating my HD


>Hello All
>                My hard disk has started giving bad clusters after about 20
>months. It is a seagate 1.2 GB HD. First it gave 4 bad clusters (for some,
>it said
>the data was readable but after long delays). The next day I ran scandisk
it
>found more than 100 bad clusters. The same day in the afternoon again it
>found
>another 100 bad clusters. I wonder what's happening to it. It lost
registery
>data and could not start win98. Fortunately all the bad clusters were
>located at the very end of the disk and not spread
>through out so I partitioned my disk and left out the that area, formated
>the new partitioned disk and installed software again. But now bad clusters
>are coming in one of the partitions. What could be the problem?  I've just
>upgraded to windows 98 and converted to FAT32. Could this be causing the
>problem ? Should I return to 32 K sized clusters (FAT16). How can that be
>done ? It would be sad because I gained about 150 MB disk space by
>converting to FAT32. Is there any thing like logical bad clusters and
>physical bad clusters? I thought bad clusters were always
>physical. Can a virus be the cause of bad clusters ? Thanks for answering
in
>advance.
>
>Mansoor
>