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From: silver@xrtll.uucp (Hi Ho Silver)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: What should I do when HD has lost clusters ?
Message-ID: <1990Jun5.023459.24781@xrtll.uucp>
Date: 5 Jun 90 02:34:59 GMT
References: <10755@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Organization: Not around here, pal!
Lines: 30

From article <10755@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>, by wjin@cs.purdue.EDU (Woochang Jin):
$ I have a 42 M Fujizu MFM hard drive and when I 'chkdsk', it complains :
$ 11 lost clusters. convert to files ?
$ My friend advised to reformat the disk drive. So I backed up the whole
$ disk and reformatted it using 'Disk Manager' which was provided with the
$ hard disk. I chkdsk'ed and it was ok. But after a week, the lost clusters
$ happened again. But the whole thing seems to work O.K.

   That's like using a bazooka to wipe out a couple of ants.  What that
lost clusters message means is that chkdsk has looked at the file allocation
table and discovered that there are some parts of the disk which are not
allocated to files, but which are also not listed as being available - i.e.
they're lost.  The procedure to recover from this problem is simple.  Run
chkdsk with the /f ("fix") option and do one of the following two things
when it asks you if you want to convert them to files:

1.  Say yes if you think the contents of those lost clusters might be
    stuff you need to keep around.  chkdsk will then take them and turn
    them into a series of files in your root directory named file0000.chk,
    file0001.chk et seq.  Have a look at these files, renaming the ones
    you want to keep and deleting those you don't want.

2.  Say no if you're sure the contents of those lost clusters are stuff
    you don't need.  chkdsk will then return them to the list of free
    clusters on the disk.
-- 
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 /yunexus!xrtll!silver (L, not 1)\ Hi Ho Silver \   just silver for short   /
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