Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!unixhub!slacvm!esr
From: ESR@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU (Ed Russell)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Hard disk problem
Message-ID: <90309.104113ESR@SLACVM.SLAC.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 5 Nov 90 18:41:13 GMT
References: <17100072@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <56991@unix.cis.pitt.edu>
Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Lines: 32

In response to:
>
>From: cncst@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Christophe N. Christoff)
>Subject: Hard disk problem
>Date: 4 Nov 90 22:17:52 GMT
>
>
>I have PC/AT compatible machine with Seagate hard disk paritioned
>into drive C and drive D.  I ran Norton speed disk for both drives
>and I was successful on drive C, and got message saying something
>like "incomplete....., run Norton Disk Doctor".  Then, I ran
>Norton Disk Doctor on drive D.   What happened was NDD was trying to
>read forever, and never return the control back to DOS.  I had to
>turn off the machine after very very long time.  After I turned on
>the machine again, drive D was bad.  I cannot use it, and I cannot
>even get a directory on the drive D.
>
>How can I fix this problem?  I hope I can recover something back
>from drive D.  Any suggestion I can try?

You didn't say how the disk was partitioned.  DOS FDISK?  Disk Manager?
You also didn't say whether you are using a disk cache program.

I have also had some recent problems with Norton (4.5) Speed Disk.  It
totally lunched the files in one directory on the D partition (FDISK from
DOS 3.3).  I had files with 0 length and all sorts of errors with
cross-linked files and clusters not attached to files.  I finally erased
the whole mess and restored from a backup.  I couldn't tell if it was
Norton alone or because I forgot to turn off the PC-CACHE from PCTOOLS
before running Speed Disk.  In any case, I usually use the compress
function of PCTOOLS because I have had a couple of suspicious things
with Norton (no proof, just suspicions).