Hi You could use a generic tester available from ontrack. Its a 30 day trial tool, but I've found it useful. Scandisk can get it wrong in a few situations, but this generally involves scandisk being corrupted or a virus infection. That reminds me there was some method to remove the mapped bad sectors without going into the registry, but I'm coming up blank at the moment. Perhaps it was a batch file. During virus removal, something had to remap the drive , and free all the clusters which weren't really bad. I'm geting #$%# annoyed I can't remember the specifics - anyhow probably a sign I should sleep more. On another note -- What is your hard drive --the brand and model. I'd suggest you get another drive and ghost or image or just plain copy the drive across to the new one. A lot of utilities cash in on this apparent cluster recovery. There are a couple of things that can happen to the media surface. Physical damage, which is common in most drives as they slowly wear out. Some of the diagnostics used to have utilities where you could shift in spare tracks. With high capacity drives these days, they may have realised its not worthwhile to do. Generally there is a underlying cause when the physical tracks are damaged. Remapping some spare cluster in, may be possible. However, you could not entirely trust the drive, not unless the physical damage was a result of a bump etc and was not likely to happen again. The next -- From factory the surface media is not magnetically perfect. The drive leaves with a "defect list" from a factory scan. This is stored somewhere outside of the normal data area, eg. you can completely fill the drive from the first CHS (0,0.0) to the end of the drive and will not write over it. Its probably where the Drive ID is stored as well. Over time, from this imperfection in the media surface, there can be what is called "growth". I gathered from some reading some time back, this means the surface has trouble switching magnetic polarity meaning data would slowly become stuck - a semi-persistent resident magnetic field on the media. This can be fixed somewhat by writting zeros or 1's to the surface. I've had problem drives and zeroed it 10 or more times before it finally came good. I've also had a number that don't respond. Some utilities would use this feature and you may actually recover a bad cluster. However there are some problems in doing that. Roughly speaking, a cluster is marked bad by a utility when it needs to be read more than an allocated number of times to retrieve the test data that was written. This means the cluster might be just making the grade. If you worry about data loss, Scandisk /time -- marks any, slower than usual reads, as bad as well.

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anenefan Could you tell me what program is under Ontrack? I tried to find it on the internet and am not sure which one you mentioned? Thankyou

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Hi You want dataadvisor ver 5 -- it works for 30 days. The program also installs a shortcut without asking, on your desktop. I winge about it, as if you were able to find them in the first place there is no real need for such a shortcut. http://www.ontrack.com/freesoftware/ http://www.ontrack.com/dataadvisor/

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Hi I forgot to ask again, the Hard drive -- what brand and model. There may well be a diagnostic available.

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anenefan, I'll checked it out anenefan, thankyou very much :)

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Hello anenefan, I downloaded Data Advisor and passed all the tests. I'm going to check into some other things such as S.M.A.R.T. and try the other suggestion by jubalsams-Response Number 3. I'll be back if I feel I need more help. thankyou for your help, I really appreciate it alot :) -Pyro

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If anyone should take interest, I just found a link to S.M.A.R.T.(diagnostic-drive-hard-tool) here: http://www.disk-utility.com/diagnostic-drive-hard-tool.html

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Hi Ontrack should test that (smart). Ontrack's tools were used by hard drive manufactures for quite a while. Your link points to. http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/ I've tried this program a while back and it wasn't a pleasant experience uninstalling it, Again Ontack data advisor should have tested that -- Smart.. If you havn't scanned for virii, do so. Use another version of scandisk or use the bootup dos version on the 98 install disk. The windows version is Scandskw.exe should you feel the need to use the system file checker (or just type in at Run the command SFC) to replace this file. (Only that file) Don't use an earlier dos version of scandisk. It would be an idea to get a second hard drive. Any laptop hard drive should be compatible so long as it does not exceed the bios hard drive size limitation.

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anenefan, I got the results from SMART, my Hard Drive is almost shot and my puter is showing it. I spent my time backing up everything. I'm going to see about replacing the disk drive asap. Thank you for all your help -Pyro

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Hi Very good you were able to back up. And wise to get another hard drive. As to testing SMART -- ??? You stated it passed alll Ontracks tests. Put it this way -- Ontrack have been about for a bit. Hard drive manufactures actually supplied a version of Ontracks diagnostics for a while there. Chances are if it passed Ontracks SMART test then its OK. If you have actually backed "all" fo the drive, including window and program dir -- I would do this. Use Killdisk the free version to wipe your disk. If you have bad clusters, I think you will have to select "skip" from time to time. OK that done fire up the win98se install disk. Boot to dos with cd support. OK go to the win98 dir [cd win98 ] Try scandisk /surface After that is done note how much was bad. Now try scandisk /time I'd be interested to see how much more of the disk is marked as bad.

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Hey there, HDD regenerator reports fixed sectors as still bad in scandisk unless you repartition the drive to update the marked sectors. Here is what the website says: Note HDD Regenerator does not change the logical structure of a hard disk drive. Therefore the file system may contain logical bad sectors marked earlier, and other disk utilities such as Scandisk will detect bad sectors even if the hard drive is successfully regenerated by HDD Regenerator. To remove non-existent bad sectors from the file table, repartition your hard disk drive or use PowerQuest PartitionMagic (Bad Sector Retest option)

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