bad clusters

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

I have recently picked up a laptop (a 390E thinkad) unfortunatly the
hardrive is full of bad clusers, so much that i cant get any OS to
install on it. i was wondering if anyone could point me to a site that
offers a utility to repair these bad clusters, so that i can use the
laptop, i would like to avoid buying a new hardrive. thanks

Paridoth

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Previously Paridoth <Sauka@cox.net> wrote:
> I have recently picked up a laptop (a 390E thinkad) unfortunatly the
> hardrive is full of bad clusers, so much that i cant get any OS to
> install on it. i was wondering if anyone could point me to a site that
> offers a utility to repair these bad clusters, so that i can use the
> laptop, i would like to avoid buying a new hardrive. thanks

If it has a lot pf bas clusters, chances are that more appear all
the time, since there likely is a fundamental problem with the drive.
Masking these bad clusters would not help much as a result.

However if you really want to try, under Linux most filesystem
creation utilities (e.g. mke2fs, mkdosfs) support a '-c' switch
that does a surface check and marks bad sectors during filesystem
creation. I am sure somebody else can tell you how to do it with
Windows (I use XP for gaming but do all my disk maintenance
including filesystem creation under Linux.)

Arno
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[Guest]

Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

In article <c5607458.0412011642.59a005b5@posting.google.com>,
Paridoth <Sauka@cox.net> wrote:
>I have recently picked up a laptop (a 390E thinkad) unfortunatly the
>hardrive is full of bad clusers, so much that i cant get any OS to
>install on it. i was wondering if anyone could point me to a site that
>offers a utility to repair these bad clusters, so that i can use the
>laptop, i would like to avoid buying a new hardrive. thanks
>
>Paridoth


There are lots of used small laptop disks around. 12GB is plenty for
anythong but XP, and even that would fit if you installed the
minimum components.

If the disk has more than a couple bad clusters I wouldn't use the
disk for anything more than a learning experience.

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a d y k e s @ p a n i x . c o m
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