"i'm looking for a dos utility"... You're posting in the Dos forum..sounds right to me :) so ignore the above ..er..'suggestions' O.K. re: disk diagnosis.. Believe it or not, i've found the plain old dos format command gives me a lot more info than you might think... Example..i hd a damaged 8 gig harddrive and i wanted to know where the damage was located.. i fdisk'ed it into 16 partitions of 500mb each (remember, you can always go back to one partition if your using fat32 or ntfs later, or just break it up into 2 gig partitions (i don't know how large your disk is...). Anyways, i formatted each partition (plain dos, i.e. fat16) , watching the progress (remember, when you format in dos it gives you a running display of which sector you're at..) until i found a partition that wouldn't complete the format (partition 11, in my case) the amount of damaged space started about halfway into that partition, so i knew that the first 10 times 500 mb (5000, plus roughly 200 more from the first part of the damaged partition) could be formatted..i fdisked that much into a primary dos partition, then made an approximately 300 mb extended partition (I labeled it bad_section ).to encompass the damaged part, then made a final partition (because partitions 12 to 16 were OK,) to cover the rest.. My point is that the dos (with the /u switch, anyways) format command gives a running display of sectors etc..you needen't even subdivide the disk if you don't mind dealing with one large number of sectors , it's just easier to find the exact part of the drive if you do... If dos formats the whole thing without incident, the disk is likely OK..the dos format will stop if it encounters an error....

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Dom I disagree this should be in general hardware forum, he could use a Linux Utility to check the disk. After all his O/S is W2K and he would get a wider response, though I suppose it has some logic somewhere in peoples brains that if it does not work and is white text on black background it must be a MSDOS or compatible problem.................LOL WMP !!!

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Hi One of the things that can interfere with the partition and format process is a semi residual magnetic image on the hard drive. Sometimes it is said to be illegal characters in a critical area, but all I know is zeroing seem to do the trick. (Zeroing differs slightly from just writing a Zero, as it actually confirms it can read the bit as a zero as well.) Anyhow, I have seem many instances where formating or installing another operating system on a partition, has been nothing but trouble, until that partition is Zeroed.

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anenefan, hmmmm... M2

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