Hi, it's me again with my stupid old notebook ... - fat16-DOS6.22-win3.11. Scandisk recovers hunderts of bad sectors ... ( actualy about 2 or 3 % of all hdd space ) The utility from compaq sp0742 ( not shure about the number - it's the fixfat2.exe ) marks all of them back as good sectors. But - not all of them can be read and write! Actualy I wouldn't have problems with this, because I just use about 100 MB - the hole HDD is 515MB-IBM - there is enough free place. The real problem is that this scandisk is really very, very slow ... I can't let the notebook so long on - I'm afraid about overheating the hard drive. I think that the real problem is in the comunication between hdd and controller ( my opinion, I'm not specialist ) If there isn't a solution for the bad sectors ( perhaps something like a driver for my hdd exact ) , is there at least a "fast bad sector find software" ? I'll be happy for each little help I can take. Thanks a lot

change the harddrive. that one is gone. your wasting your time.

Hold the bus Kjan! Seagal, are you sure that the notebooks' bios is set up properly to recognize the harddrive? I've had both notebooks & desktops that have acted like the harddrive was set up correctly, yet the computers tried to access "invisible sectors" (because the bios's were set up for larger capacity harddrives than were installed). Another suggestion is to go to the manufacturer of the harddrive's website and download their disk manager software (usually fitting on one diskette). Some of them include utilities for writing 0's to your drive (i.e. low-level formatting), fixing "bad" sectors, etc. If you want, I have diskettes for quantum, western digital, ibm and seagate, I could email you a winimage of the one you need (you would need to run winimage on the downloaded file and extract the image onto a blank floppy diskette).

that bus has flat tires.

Hi, the bios shows the correct HDD with model name, sectors, heads so one. But different partition software on dos understand the HDD with different specifications ( for example: original-1050 CYL - diferent softwares shows between 1022 and 1048 ) Doesn't mater ... I'm waisting my time - not with the HDD but with the partitions. I found about 300 MB that are O.K. and I installed all the stuf there - I still have 240 MB free :-) So thanks, I think I'll better let it so. Thanks for the help.

k... flat tires...hmm.....flub flub flub flub... :)

i'm sure if you write zero's to your drive, you'll get the whole 515mb. However, you must reinstall your system. Tim