Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!think!ames!eos!shelby!portia!zimm
From: zimm@portia.Stanford.EDU (Dylan Yolles)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Hard Drive Woes: HELP!
Keywords: hard drives, problems, desperation...
Message-ID: <6832@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 19 Nov 89 21:54:02 GMT
Sender: Dylan Yolles <zimm@Portia.stanford.edu>
Reply-To: zimm%portia@forsythe.Stanford.EDU (Dylan Yolles)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 23

If you know anything about hard drives, I'm in desperate need of your help!

One of my hard drive partitions is turning into spaghetti. By that I mean
that when I attempt to write a lot of stuff to it (maybe 2 megs) the new
files are severely corrupted, the directory looks funny, the computer
crashes, and so on. I believe that the drive can't write to certain
sectors (I recently noticed a <write fail> message from the ICD utilities).
What should I do?

a) Should I reformat the partition and hope there are no real hardware
problems with the drive itself? As far as I can tell, the ICD utilities
won't allow one to reformat a single partition: how does one accomplish
this? (I DON'T WANT TO REFORMAT THE WHOLE DRIVE!!)

b) Is there any way of determining which sectors are permanently corrupted,
so that when I reformat the partition I can tell the drive to ignore them?

I need to solve this problem a.s.a.p., as one might imagine.

Thanks -

Dylan
zimm%portia@forsythe.stanford.edu