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From: tpersky@helix.nih.gov (Ted Persky)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware
Subject: Problem with Seagate Hard Disk
Keywords: disk, virus, cluster
Message-ID: <697@nih-csl.nih.gov>
Date: 3 Dec 90 15:50:34 GMT
Sender: news@nih-csl.nih.gov
Reply-To: tpersky@helix.nih.gov (Ted Persky)
Organization: National Institutes of Health
Lines: 47

Hello,

I've been having problems with my 40 MB hard disk on my Wyse 286 PC.
I have a two-year-old Seagate ST 251 hard disk with two DOS partitions
on it, C and D.  Recently I started getting messages such as "Sector
not found, retry, abort, ignore" when accessing certain programs and
files.  When I ran the Disk Manager diagnostic software, it came up
with a slew of bad sectors, which changed each time I ran it!  (The
disk had come from the factory with a list of only three bad tracks.)
A similar type of disk checker which comes with the Wyse version of
DOS gave similar results.

I decided to run the IBM Virscan program to check for viruses.  It
encountered a few binaries for which it couldn't read a sector, but
for the most part it got thru, finding no viruses with which it was
familiar.  Then I ran Norton's Disk Doctor on both the C and D
partitions.  'D' ran fine, no problems, although most of the *.exe
and *.com files are on 'C'.  On 'C' Disk Doctor found about 15-20
clusters which were bad, and marked them as such.  Then I ran Virscan
a final time, and it came up negative for viruses.

A short time later I had trouble running the DOS 'help' command:
again "Sector not found".  This time I ran Norton's "Disk Fixer"
program, I believe it's called, on the one file, "help.exe".  That seemed
to solve that problem, as well as a few similar problems with
other *.exe files.

My questions are:

1. Why should a two-year-old disk, which I've treated with kid gloves
   (no bulletin-board programs, surge-suppressor, only parttime usage)
   have so many bad clusters after such a short time?

2. What does Disk Fixer do that Disk Doctor didn't?

3. Would physically reformatting my disk with the Disk Manager software
   and then with DOS fdisk, get rid of the bad clusters, or am I now
   stuck with them?

Thanx for your help!


-- 
	Ted Persky			phone: (301) 496-2963
	Building 12A, Room 2031		uucp: uunet!nih-csl!tpersky
	National Institutes of Health	Internet: tpersky@alw.nih.gov
	Bethesda, MD 20892