Isolating bad cylinders???

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Guest

My hd clicked. As it was recommended to my previous post, I switched the IDE
cable and the power cable to the drive without success.

I isolated to a separate partition 2 cylinders (~16 MB) where clicking were
occurred when any activity was at that place. Next, wiped out (killdisk.exe
and wipedisk.exe) remain disk space and successfully re-partition disk,
reformatted, and checked remain partitions.

Now I need to completely hide from any activity the bad cylinders, but using
there any programs such as killdisk, wipedisk, format, chkdisk (incl., from
DOS or Linux booted without hd participation) lead to “hd clicking†and pc
stopping to respond.

What program should be used to do this?

I’ll appreciated any suggestion.
Best, L
 
i_zuly said:
My hd clicked. As it was recommended to my previous post, I switched the IDE
cable and the power cable to the drive without success.

I isolated to a separate partition 2 cylinders (~16 MB) where clicking were
occurred when any activity was at that place. Next, wiped out (killdisk.exe
and wipedisk.exe) remain disk space and successfully re-partition disk,
reformatted, and checked remain partitions.

Now I need to completely hide from any activity the bad cylinders, but using
there any programs such as killdisk, wipedisk, format, chkdisk (incl., from
DOS or Linux booted without hd participation) lead to “hd clicking†and pc
stopping to respond.

What program should be used to do this?

I’ll appreciated any suggestion.
Best, L
Click to expand...

Simple - when you partition the HD, do not allocate the area with the bad
cylinders to any part. If you are lucky enough that the bad cylinders are
near the innermost or outermost cylinders, then you can still have a HD
with a single part; else, you'll have at least two parts with some unused
space between a couple of the parts.

Note that this is rarely a cure, since most of the things that cause a
bad area will subsequently cause other areas to go bad.

By the way, I've done this myself so I know it works: I turned a flaky
2GB HD into a solid 1.9GB HD, which is still in 24x7 service. {That HD
was purchased in 3/96, the bad spot was caused in 1/98, and I re-part'd
it in 7/98 to lop off the bad area. No more bad spots have occurred
since; and the HD, while these days is accessed only a few times per hour
for logging, is almost never powered down.}
 
That depends!

In the days when 10 Gb drives were big and expensive, I dropped a
nearly new one and it (unsurprisingly) developed a bad patch near the
top end. I subsequently used it without problems as a 8.5 Gb drive for
almost two years before I pensioned it off. If a bad area developed
acutely in a good drive following some form of trauma, I don't think
it is unreasonable to "map it out" and continue to use the drive
(though I wouldn't trust anything vital to it for a couple of months
or so). If it is an older drive and the bad area developed slowly over
time with no obvious provocation, I would agree with (the second part
of) your advice.

Dumb retard, use your brain and replace the hard drive.
Click to expand...


Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher
 
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