Forgive me, but I would like to respectively disagree with a few points on
this response.  The drive MAY not actually be bad.  Here is what I know.

Two companies I have worked for over the last couple of years have had
problems with these Bigfoot drives.  Not all of them have been bad, and
there are a couple of different issues to look at.  On a whole, the drives
have some major problems.  Because the platters in them are so large, and
the drive motors where not made to be as powerful as they should have been,
they do not always spin up to full speed by the time the BIOS tries to
access the boot sector.  This has had a tendancy to start damaging sectors
in the drive, with the problem degrading the drive at an exponential rate as
time goes on.  IF this is the case, then your drive may be going bad.

The second consideration is the system you have it in.  Typically, the
Bigfoots came in Compaq Deathpro 2000 machines.  Due to Compaq's little
break from industry standard with respect to how it handls system BIOS, the
systems are not terribly intuitive when it comes to hard drive detection.
What will happen on occasion is the BIOS will detect the number of sectors
on the drive to be a few less than what is actually there.  This being the
case, there will be several allocation unit recovery attempts when
formatting because the BIOS does thinks it's formatted the whole drive, when
in fact it hasn't.  I know this because I went through it on about ten
separate occasions.  After creating diagnostic floppies and making changes
to the BIOS (a very slow process with floppies) to reflect the exact
perameters of the drive, the problem went away and the drive formatted
properly.

I hope this helps.

Kyle


>From: "Glen L. Bowes" <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] format
>Date: Wed, 14 Jul 1999 08:32:20 -0400
>
>This message does in fact mean that something is wrong. The format program
>has found bad sectors and has attempted to repair them. Once the format is
>complete, run scandisk and have a look at the sectors that are marked bad,
>these will all have been marked during the format process. Not good news
>for
>the drive, if you choose to continue using it, be sure to keep a backup of
>important files!
>
>-----Original Message-----
>
>Whilst formatting recently(which  seems to be a habit of mine to fix
>problems) I noticed the message  "Trying to recover allocation unit"
>with a number/s after it. What does this message mean.


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