On Sat, 2 Feb 2008, Eric Smith wrote:
Thanks for the great info.
From a historical standpoint, I used Spinrite many, many years ago and
it was amazing. Back in the days of Dos 5.1 I had it recover damaged
disks and do hardware based diagnostics. It claimed to do wondrous
things and certainly seemed to do them - they disks worked great
afterwards. I hadn't realized it was still around.
When the scandisk ran it listed about 12 files (without extensions, of
all things) of which many would have probably have been co-located on
the drive (copied to the disk at the same time and I don't defrag that
disk.) When I searched for the listed files they were not found.
That made me wonder. I also now have a found.000 hidden folder dated
today at the root of the drive (why do they do that way? How do they
expect average users to know about hidden folders when they are not
visible by default?)
I should have been clear that I'm looking for program(s) that can fix
either/both file system and hard disk (hardware) issues. The last, of
course, assuming they are fixable - many are not.
I'll definitely go get the SMART utility you suggest and see what it
says. I definitely need to chance what I'm doing if reports a large
number of errors.
Why can't windows monitor the SMART statistics and warn us of stuff
out-of-the-box? Does Vista?
Eric
I have found, over time, at least for pre-Vista (simply haven't used Vista
enough to know) that Windows will present unusual activity when the drive
is going bad. The most obvious, and common, I've seen is Windows
complaining that pagefile.sys is running low and the system needs more
swap space - this after the system has been running fine for the longest
time and, in viewing available disk space, it shows ample space.
Otherwise, just visit the Event Viewer and check the System logs. Look
for yellow and red. I've seen plenty of markings showing a bad sector on
/device/drive0/c (or something similar). Be careful to note the drive
letter, and match it to your hard drive. I once mistook such errors from
the CD/DVD drive, and had to realize the hard drive was a single partition
(C) and the light turned on that the CD/DVD drive was drive D, which told
me either the CD drive or media was causing problems, _NOT_ the hard
drive.
Also, don't forget that Seagate _somewhat_ recently purchased Maxtor, and
most of us know Maxtor has a horrible reputation for quality. Thus, for
consumer-grade hard drives, you _might_ have a rebadged Maxtor drive that
now says Seagate. Good luck!
Scott
_______________________________________________
bblisa mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
_______________________________________________
bblisa mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
