I'm doing a surface scan - it says it has found bad areas - I said FIX and it is labelling these bad 'clusters'?

 

Yes it will mark them as bad clusters

You may be able to use the XP CD to upgrade Windows 98 if you get that installed ok once the disk errors have been fixed

However it may be better to buy a new hard drive for it (quite cheap now) if it cant fix the bad sectors

 

A thorough scan will actually check the surface and takes a long time, you need to add a switch to make it do this, by default its a logical test. (A:\scandisk /surface <enter>), from memory.

 

It's found the bad clusters at 50% through the HD ..... it's found 6 within 3% of 50% ..... trouble is, I have to click FIX each time - this could take all nite!!

Is it really fixing the HD or just telling the PC that these are bad clusters and keep away from them?

Now, if I wipe the HD again .... maybe to install XP? Will these fixes be lost?

I'm learning fast ..... my prize is a free Laptop, though I will give the old owner some cash if I can get some use out of it

 

Its f*cked Pete. You should do a surface scan, but Id either buy a new cheap 2.5" fixed disk or bin it.

 

7 bad clusters now ...... if these clusters get fixed, will it work fine?

I 'think' it is a 60Gb HD - would that be right?

When you say fixed disk - what does that mean?

Bugger!! It's found 8 bad clusters now!!

 

Now 9 ............ this could take all night - how many should I stop at, or continue?

Is a surface scan simply doing just that - scanning the surface of the disc?

Now 10!!

 

Yes it scans the surface of the disk and it puts a flag on each cluster it finds bad to make sure it wont write to that sector of the disc again

Fixed Disk just means Hard Disk

If there are a lot of bad sectors it could take some time to mark them all bad

It should work fine when they are all marked bad and 'fixed' however bad sectors are a sign that the drive is on its way out

buy a cheap 2.5" drive and swap it for the old one, and install the OS of your choice

 

Cheers .... now at 17 bad clusters - they are all at the 50-55% area ..... maybe when it gets to 60% it will whizz away and not find any more?

I've looked on EBuyer and their HD are about £50 for 160Gb - I only really need/want 40Gb or thereabouts.

If it 'fixes' the disc then I will be able to use it fine?

That XP disc still wouldn't boot though .....

 

This may be a dumb question - but - those clusters are 'marked' by windows software.

If the OS is overwritten, will it 'see' those sectors as bad - or will that 'marking' disappear?

Also, will a re-format wipe those 'markers'?

Would a re-format cure those bad clusters?

 

If I exit - to go to bed - will it resume where it left off tomorrow, or will it start all over again??

It's finding a huge chunck of bad clusters ..... not sure how big it will be - if I could tell it just to default to fix all bad areas it finds I could go to bed and let it go through the night - but it seems I need to sit here and click FIX every 10 minutes!!

 

The clusters are marked bad by the disc I think, I cant remember off the top of my head

The scandisk side usually runs in the DOS part of Windows, not sure whether its stored on the disk subsytem somewhere

Only a low level format will clear bad sectors AFAIK

If you exit and go to bed, it will start again from scratch, what you could do with is to somehow exit to DOS during the Windows 98 booting process from the CD (some Windows 98 CD's give you the choice of installing the OS or booting to DOS

That way you can run Scandisk with switches one of them is scandisk /Noninteractive which requires no user input at all

The Windows 9x version of Scandisk doesnt support the DOS 6.2 switches so the /autofix and /surface switches wont work

 

Scrub that Pete

Just get yourself into the Dos screen from the CD choose load dos or hit f8 until you get the boot menu up

you can run scandisk /surface /autofix and go to bed

 

those bad sectors are nothin, at work i had to do a thorough disk check and it marked about 18000 as bad.
your best bet is to do the scan, format the HD using a xp disc, just select the cd rom as the boot device, if tis not a bootable xp disc then theres not much u can do until u have a bootable one really.

format the HD and reload windows.

 

Command-Line Parameters for the Scandisk Tool

 

Rubbish! 18,000 bad sectors indicate a fubar'd device that will certainly fail.

 

I'm in DOS

Typed that in ... it came back straight away with no errors on disc D

???????

WooooHoooo ..... added /all to the command line and its on its way

Cheers all

I still don't think it will work tomorrow

But we will see - thanks for all your help!!

 

Drive d Your first fixed disk must be c:. d: is probably the hidden recovery partition.....

 

I think you're right .........

Anyway, it's on its merry way again now - hopefully with autofix .... I was so pleased to see that friendly DOS prompt after all these years

It was oh, ever so simple then ....... or has time re-written every line?

Thanks for your help - I'll probably be back being a pain tomorrow about it

 

hopefully there wont be too many bad sectors and it will be finished by the morning

it only takes so long because it has trouble reading the sectors which are bad and eventually after so many retries gives up, marks it as bad and moves onto the next sector

I have in the past low level formatted a drive that supposedly had too many bad sectors and it worked pefect after that, however I did choose a different sector size etc

Thesedays though its much easier and cheaper to get a new drive

 

Pete

Ive downloaded the ISO as well (the same one you have) and ive checked it with Isobuster and it is definately a bootable CD

for some reason mine saved as en_WinXP_Home_x86_build2600_iso.img, although quite why it saved as an iso.img im not sure

How did you burn the CD, what software did you use ?

I normally use Nero 7 Premium, but it doesnt normally burn img files, Magic/ISO will burn img files, Nero will if you rename the img file to iso but not sure if it does anything to the boot part of the CD

 

yawn

well,he hasnt been back into our dept for a while and its out of warranty so it doesntmatter we got it working and its quite quick as well

 

its quite quick as the hard drive is now only about 10mb not much to load

 

Well, morning all ...... it had found a few 100 bad clusters.

I have now loaded Windows98 .... and it loaded after a few attempts.

So, I have an OS - it's having trouble loading a driver for the screen - so I have a poxy screen now (default I assume?). Anyway, it won't let me alter the resolution in control panel?

Also, took the Laptop away from the mains and the battery only lasted about 25minutes - would that be normal? Never had a laptop before? I must admit it was running all night on the mains so probably didn't charge much?? Maybe??

That XP download ..... I used windows own burning software first and then used Easy CD Creator ........ 2 discs, niether seem like they are bootable? Maybe now that I have windows98 ..... will I be able to load whats on the disc??

 

Its definatly a bootable image Pete, must be the software used for burning

MagicIso is free so maybe worth trying that

If it took a few goes for Windows98 to install there may well be still bad sectors or failing sectors

You will have the default vga driver and in Windows98 you cant change the resolution from the poxy 640x480 16 colour one

Right with the Battery its probably on its last legs, if it is an old laptop the batteries dont last too long, and over the years gradually get worse and worse

I have an old Acer Laptop that no longer works on battery as it doesnt hold any charge at all, but that doesnt bother me, and my other lapop I only ever use on mains apart from the rare occasion

What you could do, and what I forgot to suggest last night was now that the bad sectors have been found you could try the restore partition and letting it restore Windows and seeing if it gets further than 25% (it may complete this time) or you can use the XP CD and do a Windows Upgrade

 

Cheers mate.

I'm not sure I still have partitions since I loaded 98 - it asked whether to format the HD and I said yes (figured that I had little to lose).

I have looked at the discs I burnt and they say that they are ISO files - just they won't boot automatically.

It won't let me explore the disc either.

I'm sure I have burned them both correctly? Is there a special proceedure to make them bootable? This bit has really confused me ..... the first disc I dragged and dropped the ISO Image onto the CD Writer and wrote it like that.

Next one I used Roxio Easy CD Writer, I think?

I have NERO ...... what do I have to make sure it copies?

Another idea I had - could I connect up my External HD which has an Image of XP on and boot from that on the laptop ..... or, even transfer from that? I'm probably talking bollox

 

It depends on whether the Windows formatted the drive or the partition

If you cant explore the disc then it sounds like they havent burnt correctly

Dragging and dropping the ISO onto the CD writer wont work as this will just burn the iso image as a single file onto the CD

I think I said in the PM about not doing it this way and making sure you burn the image

However you have Nero if it is version 7 (what I use)

Launch Nero Burning ROM, and go to Recorder in the menu and select 'Burn Image' and then find the iso/img file (in fact rename the img to iso first)

In earlier versions of Nero Burn Image is under the file menu not the recorder menu

If the laptop is quite old then there is a good chance it wont boot from USB (external devices)

 

In desperation I have put my DESKTOP XP Restore Disc in and it seems to be loading XP!!??

Used the Product Key from the back of the Laptop and it 'seems' to be loading

Do this then add SP2?

Wow ........ I'm holding my breath!!

 

You did, but I didn't quite understand what you meant, sorry!

Now it is saying I have 2 partitions ..... one 2047Mb and FAT ... the other is unpartitioned and 55184Mb ......... it's asking me to select one.

I selected the FAT one and it said that there is another OS on this partition and it advises against having two on the same partition. I'm guessing this could be 98? Could I put both on the same partition? which will it boot from? I'm clearly happy to dump 98 ..... but, it could be the old restore partition??

 

Right, I've created a new partition (E) and now formatting it as NTFS .... I hope this is right - oh, well, I have little to lose really ......................