The hard disk may be in trouble, that is certainly a
possibility.  However, I have seen this same scenario
several times on systems where the memory was bad.  Last
time it was the external cache.  Anyway, the frequent
crashing and rebooting causes a lot of scandisk, and with
the bad memory, scandisk keeps reporting bad disk sectors
when the memory is effecting its ability to test the drive.
Later formatting causes all these "reclaiming" messages
because there may not be anything wrong with the drive.
The definitive way to troubleshoot this is to remove and replace
parts until you find the one that is bad.  I usually start
by trying the hard disk in another system. There are of course
several other suspect parts besides RAM or the disk, however
small the chance, so be systematic.

If it turns out not to be the hard disk, as in my experience,
you can do like I did and delete the partitions, make new
partitions and reformat.  It takes a while to format, but it
should finish eventually.  I have to admit I would be
concerned about format running for more than a couple hours
(assuming the drive is not enormous) if you were using a
known healthy computer to perform the formatting.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, August 27, 1999 9:23 AM

A friend has an old CTX with a 100Mhz pentium overdrive cpu, 48 megs of ram,
award bios and win95. He tried so set up an internet connection but was
missing
to many files and drivers, I advised him to upgrade to win98se which he
tried to
do. He made it to the point where he had less than 10 min to go and it
started
rebooting with error messages and finally locked up completely. It would
power
down and run scandisk and then hang.
I brought it home, did a deltree windows, and did a complete install of
win95b.
this worked fine for one day, and then started running scandisk and
repairing
files on evety boot. We decided that the only alternative was a format and
reinstall. He used a boot disk that had been created with win98. the format
kept reporting on the number of allocation units reclaime
d (?) and after 24
hours was still formatting, 1gig hd, he paniced and cancelled the format and
tried again with a win95 bootdisk. Now the format command comes back with
invalid disk.
Can this hd be salvaged and if so how? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/staff.html

               PCBUILD mailing list is brought to you by:
                            The NOSPIN Group
                  http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org