December 11th 17, 09:28 AM
posted to microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
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I formatted that bad drive
On 12/10/2017 7:49 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , mike writes:
On 12/10/2017 9:19 AM, Paul wrote:
wrote:
I'm speaking about that bad drive (partition) that caused me to lose a
lot of data and could not be repaired. I finally re-downloaded as much
of the data as I could after saving what was salvagable from the drive.
Thanks for keeping us informed. Glad you finally reached an endpoint.
I have now recreated the original drive, minus around 15 or 20 files
that can not be replaced. Since I no longer needed to read that
partition, and it contained a few folders that would not allow me to
delete them, I decided to format it, before I toss it in the garbage.
I think I would have too, just out of curiosity.
I did a FULL format on it, and it formatted just fine, said there were
no errors or bad segments. I ran Scandisk on it (win98), and that too
said "no problems". (I only used the quick scandisk, not the one that
takes around 12 hours).
Perhaps do that one, overnight or something?
After all that trouble, I cant believe this drive checks out good.
But I
wont trust it, so I am going to just trash it. But I did want to see
what a Format would do to it anyhow. I never expected it to work, in
fact I was waiting for the format to fail mid stream.....
Paul and others: can you think of what might have been the reason for
James' experiences? I'd been thinking he definitely has a physical bad
patch; the fact that it was confined to one partition, with the other
two continuing to work fine, supported that. But (with reservations
depending on the outcome of the "long" Scandisk if he does it) it looks
like it might not be that after all. _Could_ it have been just some
weird form of data corruption?
[]
Paul
I'm partial to HDDscan.
Gives a graph of speed vs address.
I've got drives that chkdsk says are clean, but HDDscan shows
a bunch of places where the response time is very slow, presumably
due to multiple reads of nearly bad sectors.
Or, I think Paul has said, to where the drive's internal firmware has
"swapped in" a good sector for one that's been detected as bad; the
increase in response time being because extra head movements are
required to access those sectors, compared to the minimal amount needed
to just go through the drive in sequence as HDDscan does. And it's
usually points where the speed drop has a width and a flat bottom, and
obviously where it remains the same over successive runs; because of the
nature of the Windows OS, there are times during a run where Windows
decides to go off and do its own thing, but those should produce
downward spikes in the speed graph that are narrow, and not in the same
place on successive runs.
I'm talking about access times over a second.
Unlikely that those are seek times
to replaced sectors.
(Just out of interest - I've followed these discussions, but never
actually run it - how long does a scan take to produce one of these
graphs? [I presume it doesn't vary _that_ much with capacity, as bigger
drives tend to be faster - or?])
I never worried about it. Just turn it on and take a nap. It's only one
drive. Doesn't matter how long it takes.
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