Tom --

Could you expand a bit about your experiences with the Thorough Scandisk and
non-disk related problems? I'm especially interested in exactly what you
mean by "non-disk related" problems causing bad sectors to be marked on a
hard drive.

I have one client who is runs quite a few applications and who has suffered
from more than his fair share of reported bad sectors on several drives.
When he reformatted these drives, the bad sectors disappeared. However, in a
couple of cases, they reappeared later, usually after a few months of use.
To add to my confusion, not all of the hard drives he uses in this computer
end up developing bad sectors. There seems to be no pattern as to which of
the drives will develop these "temporary" bad sectors, and which drive
won't.

FYI - he has three Quantum 6.4GB hard drives and a CD-ROM running off an
Asus LX chipset PII motherboard.

Roxanne

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Turak Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 1999 07:52
>
> Ian, it could.  It could also be that another program has
> marked up your disk and format is trying to clean it up.
> I have had bad experiences with scandisk running the
> thorough test when there was a non-disk related
> problem.  Scandisk marks all these bad sectors on the drive
> when in fact something else is causing faulty test results.
> After I fix the first problem, format or whatever I use to set
> up the drive gives me long lists of this same message your
> getting as it attempts to verify the bad sectors are still bad.
> Typically I ended up getting all the sectors re-marked good.  I
> don't as a rule run a thorough scandisk test on a troubled
> computer unless I'm sure the other parts are tested, and
> then only from a boot diskette if the drive i am testing is the
> one windows is installed on.

         The PCBUILD web site always needs good submissions.  If
          you would like to contribute to the website, send any
               hardware tech tips or hardware reviews to:
                           [log in to unmask]