[GLLUG] Off Topic Hard Drive Question

[Mark Tarquini]

Thanks for all the input.  Luckily (i think) the laptop is not mine. 
I'm trying to just give the girl a temporary solution until she contacts
her friend who works at Sony to send her a new drive. 

To satisfy her, umm, demands, I showed her that ME would not install
either on it, she had ME before, hoping to prove to her that it wasnt
just XP or 2K not working.  XP and 2K do install, well, they locked up
completely twice, but then when you're using it, it will lock randomly.

On a more amusing note, you should hear the screeching noise the HD
makes every so often. =)

thanks again. =)

-Mark

On Tue, 2004-03-30 at 14:36, Matt Graham wrote:
> On Tuesday 30 March 2004 13:13, after a long battle with technology, 
> Mark Tarquini wrote:
> > I have a laptop which I have determined has a hard drive with bad
> > clusters on it.  Can I partition around the bad clusters and only use
> > the partitions that do not have bad clusters?
> 
> You Mean "bad sectors".  Anyway, you can do this, but given modern SMART 
> tech and bad-sector remapping in hard drives, by the time you start 
> seeing bad sectors, your disk is mostly toast.  Any repartitioning to 
> get around the bad sectors will be a temporary solution at best, since 
> the number of bad sectors on the disk will only grow as time goes on 
> and the placement of the new bad sectors will be effectively random.
> 
> > The problem I'm running into is that Windows ME cannot copy it's
> > setup files to the HD when I run setup. Windows 2000 and XP completely 
> > lock up at random times. 
> 
> LoseME?  Ack.  Anyway, I'd suggest replacing the drive.  Even 2.5" 
> drives are getting cheaper than ever.
> 
> > will windows still try to read those bad clusters even if they are 
> > unused partitions without a file system on them?
> 
> 'Doze won't read the bad sectors if they're not in a partition that 
> 'Doze recognizes.  If new bad sectors pop up within a partition that 
> 'Doze is using, you'll get problems.
-- 
Mark Tarquini <mark at iametarq.com>