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.


-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Newman
Sent: Tuesday, July 13, 1999 3:35 PM

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. Does it mean the HD is on
the way out? Its a 2 1/2 year old Quantum Bigfoot.

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                  http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org