I have to disagree, bad spots or clusters on a hard drive should not be
taken lightly, it is not a normal occurance that you have to  live with.  It
is a sign the hard drive is going to fail, however there are exceptions!
Sometimes a software will not work right and  your system will lock up and
you have to reboot.  Your system should normally start scandisk or chkdsk
and check and fix errors, but on occasion I have seen where  this correction
was not done!  To test this, I use Norton Disk Edit (I believe there is an
old free version of this utility somewhere and you may have to use a utility
that can read NTFS like NTFSDOS from Winternals, or after a backup, or if
there is no data on the drive, you can use FDISK and remove the partition
entirely.) to find the bad spots and MARK them good. I then run a complete
scandisk / check disk (which takes extra time) and the errors do not come
back!
    Another scenario, a owner can accidentally drop their HD and cause
variosly located bad clusters, but they are usually grouped in only specific
locations on the drive (front, back, etc.).  As this is a one time occurance
(we hope!), you just have to partition the drive arround the errors.  The
area arround the errors cannot be partitioned and will never be used again.
I use this kind of setup to transfer files from one machine to another but
not as a permanent installation.

Anotherīs screen saver - blank screen problem...  you might want to dissable
all energy saving settings on your machine.  I have a  WIN98SE /  XP Pro
dual boot setup.  When the energy setting tells the monitor to go to sleep
in Win98SE, my UPS ( too small) cannot take the strain and my system
reboots!  In WinXP Pro, it wakes up perfectly...  everything works.  As you
might expect, I love XP, I donīt loose data anymore leaving my computer to
download overnight and touching the mouse in the morning...  ZAP!

Howard Rubin
Fortaleza, Brazil

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