strange scandisk behavior

[blakerwry]

I was running defrag(win98) and got an error message that I should run the thorough scandisk... so I do...

But I notice something odd.... I am running scandisk and I look at the HDD activity light... it is off....

I look at the CD activity light... and It's on... I check the CD drive... empty... ???


aparently, after about cluster number 1,030,000 on the thorough HDD scan, my HDD activity light goes off and my CD activity light starts coming on... doesnt matter if there is a CD in the drive or not...

I did a search for this kind of stuff but mostly came up with irrelevent results... anybody have a clue to why scandisk is doing this?


After scandisk is finished I might try putting the CD drive on another channel.. but I bet all the sectors are going to be marked bad on the HDD....

is there anyway to mark these sectors as good so i can re-test them? (besides reformatting)

 

[Tea]

Zpinrite can do this. Un-mark the zectorz, I mean. As for the cauze, well, I have no idea and I will await the reply of a proper ztorage guru with interezt.

 

[blakerwry]

hmm.. i thought it might be caused by an overflow in the hardware... but the DOS version of scandisk does not exhibit the same behavior...

that only leaves the drivers and the windows version of scandisk itself... how odd.... considering that both win98 and scandisk for win98 were designed to run on fat32 and hence.. large drives...

 

[blakerwry]

well... even after running scandisk i get the defrag error "defrag006"

according to microsoft the problem is that defrag cant read one or more (possibly bad) sectors of the HDD...


I am thinking about letting this slide and just not defragging this drive.. or possibly trying a 3rd party util.

 

[blakerwry]

muhahaha... I found a fix... computing.net had this fix... as it was alos posted on a microsoft tech article...

It recomended defragging free space only, then doing files, then defagging everything, however these options were not listed in the win98 advanced section.... i only remember them from the win95 defrag tool.


After a bit more stumbling I found this list of switches for defrag
http://members.shaw.ca/pccruiser/articles/defrag.htm#DEFRAGSWITCHES

Syntax
defrag [drive: | /all] [/F | /U | /Q] [/noprompt] [/concise | /detailed]

Parameters

drive: Drive letter of the disk to be optimized.
/all Defragment all local, nonremovable drives.
/F Defragment files and free space.
/U Defragment files only.
/Q Defragment free space only.
/concise Display the Hide Details view (default).
/detailed Display the Show Details view.
/noprompt Unattended mode; do not stop and display confirmation messages.
UNDOCUMENTED SWITCH
/P tells defrag to process hidden/systems files, which it otherwise would treat as unmovable.


Windows 95 Defrag.exe Command-Line Parameters
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;q155326 (W95 Dec. 17, 2000)

after that I was successfuly able to defrag... now I just have to figure out scandisk... like it really matters.

 

[blakerwry]

Zpinrite can do this. Un-mark the zectorz, I mean. As for the cauze, well, I have no idea and I will await the reply of a proper ztorage guru with interezt.

Yeah, and I think it's only $90 right now..... :x