From: dg AT dcs DOT st-and DOT ac DOT uk Message-Id: <5728.9702040951@dufftown.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk> To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Subject: Re: [opendos] hard disk splits In-Reply-To: cwg01@gnofn.org's message of Mon, 03 Feb 97 18:09:45 -0600. Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Tue, 04 Feb 97 09:51:35 +0000 Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net Precedence: bulk [...] >About a year ago, I bumped my hard drive. No physical damage was done, >but the drive was writing at the time and it trashed a bunch of address >marks. Now I have an invisible ceiling on my 540m drive at about >200-220m's. Scandisk _will_ find 'bad' clusters, but after reporting >which cluster gave it a fit, it hangs. Scandisk *hangs*? Hmmm. Well, if no physical damage was done, then a low-level reformat will fix everything. What sort of drive do you have? You'll have to get the specific formatter from the vendor. I know that Seagate release a formatter, FORMAT3, because I have Seagate drives; I've heard that some other vendors do the same. Failing that, you need to find the dead clusters and bracket them off somehow. Assuming that you find a program that will detect them --- Scandisk or NDD or something like that (does OpenDOS have one?) --- then you can create a dummy partition over the damaged area and still use the disc space above and below. FIPS is a program that will let you split a partition. It'll update all the internal pointers in the filesystem so that it's still consistent, and then update the partition table. Problems with it are that it doesn't resize the FAT or change the cluster size, so there's a certain amount of wasted space. Partition Magic does everything, but is commercial. There's some others I haven't met. [Note: please do *not* cc: replies to me if you're also sending to the list! I get enough mail as it is without getting things twice] -- ------------------- http://www-hons-cs.cs.st-and.ac.uk/~dg -------------------- If you're up against someone more intelligent than you are, do something totally insane and let him think himself to death. --- Pyanfar Chanur ---------------- Sun-Earther David Daton Given of Lochcarron ------------------