On Mon, 11 Dec 2017 03:49:43 +0000, "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.
Yep, all I have to do now is copy my rebuilt partition to the computer
it belongs on. Because of Win98 not accessing many of these large
external hard drives, and that computer only having USB 1.1, I did the
whole rebuild on a portable drive. Now I'll plug the new drive and the
portable one into my XP machine to transfer everything over.
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 planned to do that, just for the heck of it.
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?
I thought of plugging it into a spare computer to run it. I cant use
this one meaning cant use the internet with that thing running, it slows
down the computer so much it's not usable. But if I run the tests on an
XP machine, I cant run scandisk, I have to use Chkdsk, or I could run
Norton Disk Doctor (if that program works on XP.... I never tried it).
Or, I suppose I could just install Win98 on a spare machine, thats easy
enough to do, and I have 5 or 6 small HDDS to install it on.
But this all seems senseless since I am going to trash that drive
anyhow. I just cant see myself trusting it again....
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?
I really think Scandisk screwed it up more than anything. Scandisk seems
to be helpful "Most of the time", but I am sure it can screw up too.
However, I also question my IDE data cable. I initially replaced that
HDD with a 160gb drive, but that was before I learned that Win98 can not
support a drive larger than 120gb. (Actually 132gb). That drive
repeatedly kept running scandisk, and there was very little data on it
yet. I was only using it to save downloads at that point. I ordered some
of the 80 wire IDE cables from ebay, just to upgrade the cables, and
when I changed that cable, the problems seemed to stop/ However I also
got my 120gb drive in the mail about that same time and changed to that
drive instead. So, it's hard to know if the problem was the cable, or
having a drive too big for the OS.
[]
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.
(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've never run across that HDD SCAN program, I may give it a try, but
probably not on that bad drive. I think that drive and also that old
data cable earned a place in my garbage.I like to salvage old stuff, but
not something that caused me this much trouble...
By the way, I mentioned losing the 2011 NEC (Electric code book). I did
find that again, it's on archive.org.