I probably have a damage on my hard drive. When I startup it automatically runs scandisk and at cluster 108905 it locks totally (and makes a scratching noise) and I have to restart (without running scanddisk) to be able to use the computer. It works alright although some files aren't accessible. I can't run scandisk from windows, cause it's the same phenomenon (stops and locks at 108905). How can I get rid of this? Can I manually delete that cluster?(I'd rather not reformat) Cheers!

Scratching noise from the hard drive is not good. This cannot be repaired with software. Buy another drive while you can still access the data.

bad sectors / clusters are there to stay. It is a physical problem and cannot be set right by any software as Dave said. get yourself a new hard disk and use this one as secondary and pull the life out of it. but do not store impt. data on it. i use a "bad" 2 GB HD to take those *.dat files ( u know what i mean :D ) from one comp to another.... -Kailas Shastry

You can try booting from a win98 startup floppy and type scandisk c: /surface That will check all the sectors on your drive and make all the bad ones unavailable. You should still consider getting another drive.

By all means, follow the above advice. But, get the new hard drive now. This thing may work like this for years or it may totally fail the next time you use it. Like Kailas says: "get yourself a new hard disk and use this one as secondary and pull the life out of it. but do not store impt. data on it." Good luck