Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!sm.unisys.com!ism780c!ico!nbires!matt
From: matt@nbires.nbi.com (Matthew Meighan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Cause/cure of bad sectors??
Summary: try low-level format
Keywords: hard disk bad sectors
Message-ID: <185@nbires.nbi.com>
Date: 21 Nov 88 18:05:31 GMT
References: <4523@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: matt@nbires.UUCP (Matthew Meighan)
Organization: NBI Inc, Boulder CO
Lines: 32


In <4523@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>, greg@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Gregory Nowak)
says:

> 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.
> [stuff deleted]  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?


I had the same problem with a Seagate 20MB disk, that is, sectors
going bad at random every week or so.  I did a low-level (physical) format
on the disk and the problem went away.  The drive ran fine for a couple
of years after that.

If you have a Western Ditital controller, you can do a low-level
format by going into debug and typing

- g=C800:05 <cr>

at the debug prompt.  Of course, this will blow away all data on the
disk, so do a backup first.

Otherwise, whoever sold you the drive and/or controller should be able
to tell you how to do the physical format.