> bad clusters after about 20 months... First it gave 4 bad clusters..
> found more than 100 bad clusters... The same day in the afternoon again it
> found another 100 bad clusters. What could be the problem?

This scenario is typical when a hard drive begins to fail.  That is,
you are likely to find more and more bad clusters.  You might have
better luck in flagging all of those bad clusters with a third party
utility such as Norton Utilities.  However, it sounds like your hard
drive is on its way out...  I would recommend that you backup all of
your important data ASAP!

Changing your partitions is not likely to make any difference at all.
In fact, you could cause more problems when  the partitions are
altered if you run into more bad spots at that time.  FYI - Partition
Magic is about the best solution for converting a drive *back* to
FAT16 from FAT32.

http://www.powerquest.com/

Dean is correct in that your hard drive is probably under warranty if
it is going bad after only 20 months.  I would contact Seagate when
the drive is no longer usable for a warranty replacement.

This type of behaviour is not caused by a virus.  However, you
should scan your hard disk regularly enough to be sure that you
are virus free...  F-Prot has a *free* (for individual use) Dos virus
scanner that is among the best.  F-prot will scan your entire
system and If you stick a shortcut in your sendto folder to a batch
file as follows you will find that it works quite well in Windows to
scan folders or files on demand...

\fprot\f-prot.exe %1

You can get F-Prot here:

ftp://ftp.DataFellows.com/f-prot/free/fp-302.zip







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