Hi Bjorn, Karen, and All,
}- Either: Usually when a IDE drive shows lots of bad sectors, it
}- is an early warning about forthcoming sudden death. Backup
}- your valuable data right now if you can. Do this in any case!
I have experienced this first hand. Definitely back up while you
can. IDE's don't die like other drives - that is, most other
drives start giving you clues that they are sick and you usually
have plenty of time to back up. IDE's die suddenly just as Bjorn
says.
}- Or: Bad sector translation. When you run Norton disk doctor
}- surface scan, if sector translation is not working, when Disk
}- Doctor passes the 1024th cylinder, it will say that all of the
}- remaining sectors and clusters are bad. This will happen about
}- 500 MB to 600 MB into the hard drive. If this is the case, you
}- will need to backup all your data, or at least make sure you
}- don't write new data to your disk until you can. When you have
}- managed to back up your data, you will need to reinstall the
}- hard drive making sure CMOS (BIOS) is set to use LBA (Logical
}- Bloc Addressing) translation. LBA is needed to support drives
}- larger than 528MB. Then with this new setup you must
}- reparation (FDISK) and format before you can install OS and
}- restore your other data from backup. If your BIOS doesn't
}- support LBA the solution is either a Bios upgrade, or a drive
}- overlay software that can handle the translation. Another
}- alternative is a new disk controller with a onboard Bios that
}- supports LBA.
I also have first hand experience with this, on my last desktop
machine. You did get it right Bjorn.
If you do decide to use the drive overlay software be aware that
this will slow your hard drive down some, more or less, depending
on size, processor, memory, etc. Caching then becomes an issue,
and if you don't set your disk caching up correctly it will
actually slow things down rather than speeding them up.
Boanne
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