Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!tness7!ninja!cpe!techsup!kenb
From: kenb@techsup.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: HD problems
Message-ID: <9500001@techsup>
Date: 27 Aug 88 15:40:00 GMT
References: <906@tiger.oxy.edu>
Lines: 26
Nf-ID: #R:tiger.oxy.edu:906:techsup:9500001:000:1216
Nf-From: techsup.UUCP!kenb    Aug 27 10:40:00 1988


i'm reading under a friend's account, so flame the signature if 
necessary :-)

regarding your track 0 errors, it kind of depends on how/where you
are getting them.  if you can get a low-level format on the drive
(whatever your DOS calls it, there seems to be a wide variance in
naming), you can cheat a little bit during the partitioning process
and put the start of the partition further into the drive.  in
other words, instead of starting partition 1 at track 0, start it
at track 5 (or whereever the disk stops giving you problems.)  then,
do a high-level format on the partition as usual.

DOS will boot off the active partition on your hard drive, and doesn't
much care where it starts (i.e. you could conceivably create 4
partitions and activate the last so that it would be your boot drive). 

i can't recommend this as a permanent fix to your problem (if it applies
to your case), but it's probably not bad as an interim (sic?) solution.
i imagine it's better than living totally devoid of hard drives... :-)
of course, if cylinder 0 is so wrecked that you can't even get the boot
block onto it, this won't work....

cheers,

valerie see  ...techsup!qat!valsee
(blame me, not the owner of this account!)