I have windows 2000 on one of my pc's and I looked in the
event log and it said " The device,\Device\Hard disk0\ DRO
has a bad block"
I did an error check on my C drive and it failed.
Does anyone have any suggestions???
Thank you!
If the machine is still under warranty, get a replacement drive from the
manufacturer. If the mfr balks, make suitable dissatisfied noises until they
do what they should do. But that's not the end of the story.
Do you have a 2nd partition or drive in the machine? If so, and the machine
boots, copy all must-keep data to that 2nd drive. If you can, burn it to a
CD. If any of of the data covers the bad block, that data will be corrupted,
but it may be partly salvageable anyhow.
If the machine doesn't boot, saving data will require taking the drive to
technician and spending some $$$, so you may want to just lose the data. In
this case, the bad block contains some W2K system file(s), so you won't lose
any data.
What happens next is up to you. If you have only the one drive, buy a new
one, and reinstall W2K. NB: Partition this drive first, making the C:
partition at 5-10MB in size, and using the remainder of the space for the D:
drive. Put W2K onto the C: drive, and keep the D: drive for data. When (not
if) W2K acts up again, and a repair or reinstall is necessary, your data will
be safe. (NB: your CD/DVD drives will now have different letters -- no
problem at all.)
The old drive may be salvageable. Reformatting it will mark the bad block,
and it won't be used. You could keep it as a data drive. However, it's likely
that the drive will fail again, and IMO it's not worth the risk. But that's
up to you.
Of course, if you have a really old machine (more than 2 years), it may be
worthwhile to buy a brand new one. Tell the store to partition the hard drive
first, as suggested above. (Personally, I would insist on it.) You can get
very nice machine for $500Can or less ($350US or less), complete with
monitor, etc, so long as you are not dazzled by glitz. A 1MHz machine is
plenty fast enough for everything except the most extreme games.
When it
comes to computers, it's never worth buying the latest and fastest IMO - wait
a year or so for prices to come down to reasonable levels.
