Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!greg
From: greg@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Gregory Nowak)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Cause/cure of bad sectors??
Keywords: hard disk bad sectors
Message-ID: <4523@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 20 Nov 88 19:13:47 GMT
Reply-To: greg@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Gregory Nowak)
Organization: Princeton University, NJ
Lines: 20


A friend of mine has a Seagate 20MB hard disk in a Leading Edge clone.
She has been having some problems with data on the disk -- for
example, when she tries to run Wordperfect, she'll get a Read error;
on a retry she'll get a General Failure error. Since wordperfect
occasionally balks if a directory (not its own) is bad, I tried doing
an xtree /a to see if all the directories would show up. It worked
fone, and then so did wordperfect. The next day WP was down again, I
did a "recover" on it, and it had bad sectors. Her question is, how do
sectors go bad in a program that's occupied the same disk space for a
year? And, is this a self-propagating problem; i.e., is simply
ignoring it actively bad for the disk, or is this simply a result of
wear and tear on the disk that one might as well put up with if one is
making backups?

Thanks,
-- 

rutgers!phoenix.princeton.edu!greg   Gregory A Nowak/Phoenix Gang/Princeton NJ 
    "Take 2*3*5*7*11*13.  It's divisible by 59." --Matt Crawford