Bad sectors on hardrive

[MARKBLACK]

A friend of mine has been given a 100 mhz 486, with a 540 meg hard, as the hardrive is small he decided to fit his own 1.1 gig hardrive,from his slower 66 mhz machine,since he has fitted and tried now has errors on it, of which he said has been caused by this different motherboard and processer,I am unaware whether this can be the case, sounds unbelieveable, but he is convinced this is the case.I am wondering how can an hardrive which is supposed to be free from errors on one machine then put onto another machine then end up with errors on it.Does anybody have any idea's..

Markblack

[fordvan]

You need tha drive overlay program from the hard drive web page to properly use that hard drive with a 486. I just put a 6.4 gig HD in a friends puter on the weekend and I had to go to Fulitsu's page to download the utility. Installed with no problems and reports all 6.4 gig.

[MARKBLACK]

Hi fordvan, thanks for your reply, but it seems that the 100mhz board can see the drive, as the 1.1 gig, as far as I'm aware, but its suppose to be reporting that there's errors on the drive or this is what I'm led to beleive I havn't seen for myself yet because this friend lives a good drive away from me. But I have noted your reply and I will put this to him when I'm next in contact, it seems strange to me, I'll keep you informed.

Markblack

[Toaster]

In the past 5 years, many changes have been made to the IDE interface. A number of settings CAN give you the results that you found. What you found is actually quite common because of timing differences of the interface.
The IDE interface is nothing more then a "bus" because the actual interface per say is located on the HDD. The place where you connect the cables on the system board/controller is nothing more then an adaptor to adapt to the system board bus to the IDE HDD/peripheral.
In those years, the following is very important:
1. The cables from the IDE device(s) in total can not exceed 18 inches per port/channel.
2. The system "bus clock" must not exceed 33mhz (PCI) or 8mhz (ISA). This is the I/O slot speed, not the CPU speed.
3. Only 2 devices per port/channel.
4. Some devices acted badly when slaved/mastered to another device, try shuffling the devices.
5. The IDE adaptor/controller is very suceptable to noise (electrical), keep cables short and away from metal if possible.

[glc]

I would suggest that he start from scratch - boot with a system floppy, fdisk, delete all partitions, reboot, fdisk, create new partition(s), reboot, and format C:

If there truly are bad sectors, they will be reported on the summary screen at the completion of the format. If it comes up clean, install the operating system and press on.

My 486/100 board had a bios that was good up to 2 gigs. If it reports the 1.1 gig drive correctly and indicates it's in LBA mode, you are in good shape and do not require an overlay.

[theENiGMA]

Badsectors are funny things. I've got a Maxtor drive, currently in my game box, with almost a Meg of bad sectors. It has worked reliably for more than 2 years with this condition (It's almost 4 years old). I have reformatted and reinstalled serveral times with no problems. I have a friend who had a WD drive with 200K in bad sectors. The day after he discovered this, it went completely south. We have no idea how long it had this condition previously, but the drive was only a year old. He was just doing a routine scandisk. Since we had used some "creative" (oops!) ways of trying to fix it, the warranty was gone. We took the cover off, and put it on a shelf in his room. It makes a nice decoration.
-KEiTH


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Well, I'm off to go look for myself. If I should get back before I return, tell myself to wait for me.

[This message has been edited by theENiGMA (edited 08-12-2000).]