HDD have developed bad sectors..I think it's not valid? 5

[rBen]

I have these errors for couple of months now, everytime I start booting up these 2 messages come up:
"One or more of your disk drives may have developed bad sectors. Press any key to run scandisk with surface analysis on these drive..."
then..after hitting a key the next mssg comes up->
"There was an error running Scandisk for Windows, as you many still have errors on your disk. Press any key to continue starting windows"

Then after hitting any key Windows98 loads and has no more problem. I have been getting these errors everytime I boot-up. I feel these are not legitimate errors as I've ran scandisk & norton's disk Dr. without problem. Is there a way around to get rid of these errors so it will not comes up during boot, say using registry or any other method, and how?

I use windows 98 up to date with latest patches, ver. 6.0.2800.1106IS. last patch-Q834707 from MS. I used my computer daily: emails, chatrooms(mirc), IM (yahoo, msn, paltalk, sometimes ICQ, and browsing around like now!

My drive C is 5gb, Drive D is 2gb which i hardly use.
Please help me get rid of these errors.Would appreciate any suggestions to resolve these errors. thanks!
rben

 

[Lemon13]

1.go to manufactors website and dl a diagnostic utility to check the hdd´s. (recommended)
2.edit boot.ini in root (hidden) and set AutoScan to 0 or add AutoScan=0 to it. (if hdd has errors it might die every minute, do a backup of ur important files)
have you ever run scandisk after windows booted?, alt. run chkdsk /f (start/run, chkdsk /f checks hdd and tries to fix errors)

 

[rBen]

3/24/2005
Im still gettting these 2 errors without fear of having a really bad hard disk. I still believe these errors are fluke. I checked boot.ini via Dos prompt and i cant find that file. IN fact did a attrib |more to see all the attributes of all the files and folders under drive C:\ roots and there is no such file.
Also ran run: chkdsk /f and it wont run this commmand
I have run scandisk after i got those errors and it doesnt show any error at all.
Hopefully there is a way to get rid of these error on boot-up.
Any other suggestions to remove these errors?
rBen

 

[edfair]

Did you run the manufacturer's diagnostics?

 

[trollacious]

Try looking in MSDOS.SYS for the autoscan line.

Lee

 

[ANFPS26]

Boot to a DOS command prompt. Type scandisk, and when it asks if you want to run a surface scan, say "yes". It will find and mark all bad sectors. It desn't look like you have been doing the surface scan with scandisk.

Jim

 

[stduc]

If you want to try to save the data on your hard drives and want to thoroughly check them out then use spinrite rather than scandisk. But it does cost a few dollars.
You can get it here, as a download.

http://grc.com/spinrite.htm

I have found it invaluable from time to time.

 

[rBen]

Edfair, since I want to avoid opening the PC physically to find out who manufacture my HDD I did ran my old ALL Micro PC diskette "troubleshooter" program by dos-booting into it. I ran the HDD non-destructive read test without any problem & other mechanical analyser tests error free.

I have come across that spinrite program before, in fact I have that old program still. Do you (stduc) think that is safe to run that with all my files and application programs in there as well as win98 OS? If I'm not mistaken that spinrite kinda run test on every byte rigidly so it take a long time to complete.Oh U did mention to save the whole disk,,hehe if I do that might as well reload the whole win98 & application programs.For now I dont have a backup drives that I can use sorry, I should when money is not tight. I will go to that website though and check that new spinrite program.

Jim,(anfps26)Way back,in 98 when i worked at the school district my superior discouraged us from running scandisk dos-wise? It seems it mess it up at the time, he always suggested running it window-wise. The scandisk, & norton disk dr. i ran did those surface scan though all the way!

Lee(trollacious), I will try msdos.sys for the autoscan line
Are we to see on Boot.ini entries that will say those errors & just mark them like we do via system/win.ini ?? to disable them?
rBen

 

[stduc]

I have used SpinRite for many years. About every 6 months or so I let it loose on all my drives in mode 1. Mode 1 just reports. Recently I had a drive go bad very rapidly. I let it loose in mode 2 (test and spare bad sectors) then backed up up the drive. I lost nothing. By the time I had done this the BIOS was reporting that SMART status was critical. I just let Sprinrite look at the drive out of curiosity. Spinrite came up with a message to the effect of "backup this drive now - don't bother with me as the drive will fail totally before I finish!" So I ditched the drive.
I have never lost a byte to SprinRite. The new version 6 does all versions of FAT and NTFS. It also reports drives model; make; serial number; SMART status; temperature and more! You don't need to open the case. It will even work on a RAID array - but they recommend you break the array and put the drives on their own. I have used spinrite on a RAID - it works, but you get no information about which disk it is sparing sectors off on! I have also just put individual RAIDed drives on an IDE channel to test with spinrite. Had it spare a few dodgy sectors and then put the RAID back together. The RAID controller never even noticed!.

You are right though it can take a while - maybe an hour per 100GB. More if it has trouble getting the data off a bad sector. As I said I regularly run it on disk with the O/S / files etc on. IMHO it's safe.

 

[mainegeek]

rBen,

"My drive C is 5gb, Drive D is 2gb which i hardly use."

I would suspect Drive D as the culprit. Have you run a standard scandisk on this drive as well? If not, running a standard scandisk with "display summary" enabled should show the bad sectors.

 

[jurgen36]

I have a Seagate 80 Gbyte drive here which had a couple of dozen bad sectors. Fdisk or reformating did not help to get rid of them. I zeroed the drive and reformated with the Seagate utility. No more bad sectors, however as I did not trust the drive I run Spinrite, this gave a clean bill of health it did not find any problems. I did a further check by filling the drive completely with data. Then comparing the data with the originals, again no more problems. Apparently some application or other declared bad sectors and normal procedures did not help at all. So you have a good chance that your drive is ok. Back the drive up, zero it out, fdisk and reformat, you might be lucky.
Regards

Jurgen

 

[edfair]

I agree that there is a good possibility that the drive is OK based on all of the tests. But the definitive test is the manufacturer's if they have one. There are a couple of manufacturers that don't have them available.

You could download and run Belarc Advisor. It will give you the manufacturer.

In any case, good luck with it.

 

[stduc]

The problem with scandisk and XP's disk check utility is they will find and mark bad sectors, but not recover the data on them. So you end up with one or more corrupt files.

The trouble with the manufacturers free utilities I have found is they are not very thorough, not do they tell you much.

SpinRite gives you a full diagnostic and also display a lot of the SMART data. Such as how long the disk has been powered up, how many errors it has ever had and other good stuff. So you can get a feel for whether it you have a good drive, or it’s on its way out or actually dying! I always get SprinRite to exercise a new disk before I use it as well.

OK - so I am a fan of SpinRite - I admit it! But I don’t work for them – I just think it’s a great product, worth every penny.

Jurgen36 - SprinRite should have told you whether any sectors had ever been spared on the drive and if so, how many!

 

[edfair]

I agree on the SpinRite. There is no counting on the number of my customers who have had stepper motor drives ressurrected using it and other drives of later technology repaired.
And I agree on the lack of information from some of the manufacturer's free diagnostics.
But I still reccommend the manufacturer's stuff as a starting point. If it is bad there, saving it with SpinRite will lead you down the "primrose path" to disaster.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[rBen]

BINGO! Lee(Trollacious)& Lemon13 Found autoscan line at msdos.sys, removed attribute SHR & then made scan line =0 instead of 1, then restored attrib SHR, rebooted system and
errors gone! ..WOW

NOW, the million $ Q: What did we really do after making autoscan 0 instead of 1? Did it now prevent any other errors transparent to the system on bootup? Just curious, Lee & Lemon ( but thanks though I guess that solves my original request to get rid of those errors, hehe)

StDuc, jurgen36, & Edfair for the infos on Spinrite. I will definitely buy that program when dough comes handy, I am really impressed with all your show of respect to that disc utility. Also, when time comes then I will also get me a dvd drive to back-up my system before something happen.

Edfair, here is what I found after d/l Belarc Advisor:
HARD DRIVES: 7.34 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity
1.68 Gigabytes Hard Drive Free Space

Generic IDE hard disk drive C: (5.24 GB) -- drive 0, No SMART Driver
Generic IDE hard disk drive D: (2.11 GB) -- drive 1, No SMART Driver
Although it didnt say what manufacturer the drives are, I surely like that program to show other stuff I never know on my system, shows all hardwares & softwares I installed on my system, THANKS.

Thank U all for the superb efforts..if there is a "caveat" to what I did, please don't stop here, tell me more what to expect,,,learned lots from these exercise, as Edfair said,
" a primrose path" to me for now is welcome even if I will be sorry later ( hope not !)
rBen

 

[stduc]

What O/S are you running?

I assume you mean config.sys, rather than msdos.sys!

By changing AutoScan=1 to AutoScan=0 you have simply prevented scandisk from running at startup. Therefore not detecting any errors on your hard drives. So you haven't exactly got rid of them!

You may have a log file called scandisk.log in the root of your C drive - open it with notepad, it may give some clues.

If you are prepared to trust microsoft utilities you could try the following from the command line. (N.B. the path to scandisk may be different on your system)

c:\windows\command\scandisk - followed by.....
/ALL Checks and repairs all local drives.
/AUTOFIX Fixes damage without prompting.
/CHECKONLY Checks a drive, but does not repair any damage.
/CUSTOM Configures and runs ScanDisk according to SCANDISK.INI settings.
/NOSAVE With /AUTOFIX, deletes lost clusters rather than saving as files.
/NOSUMMARY With /CHECKONLY or /AUTOFIX, prevents ScanDisk from stopping at
summary screens.
/SURFACE Performs a surface scan after other checks.


Or.........


CHKDSK [drive:][[path]filename] [/F] [/V]

[drive:][path] Specifies the drive and directory to check.
filename Specifies the file(s) to check for fragmentation.
/F Fixes errors on the disk.
/V Displays the full path and name of every file on the disk.

 

[trollacious]

No, he means MSDOS.SYS, just like he wrote. Having AUTOSCAN set to 1 means Scandisk ALWAYS runs when you start the computer up. From what I've seen, that's usually set only if there's been a problem with a shutdown, and is changed to 0, or removed, when Scandisk is run the next time. However, sometimes it's not changed back, and you get caught in the frustrating loop of Scandisk running each time you start the computer without finding anything wrong. I've run into this problem a number of times with different people's computers, so it's not at all uncommon.

Lee

 

[edfair]

You have resolved the problem of scandisk running each time the system boots. Now you need to put the possibility of errors to rest also, which was the second part of your original post.
Do a surface scan and let it mark anything that it finds as bad. Then try it again in a week or so. If nothing else shows quit worrying about it.
This doesn't mean the hard drive won't fail. They all fail. Usually at the most inopportune time. So you develop a backup schedule to give some reasonable protection of valuable data and proceed with life.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[stduc]

[blue]trollacious[/blue] (Programmer)
No, he means MSDOS.SYS, just like he wrote

Quite right. I'm forgetting my Windows98!

 

[rBen]

Hehehe,,nice guys, U all find time to figure out "what it should be" by comparing notes.

* Yes, it's windows 98 as i mentioned from the beginning.
* Yes I have run that scandisk & Norton's Disk Dr. on drive D before as many times as i ran it on drive C. And many times I also skip running to it to speed up time to fin.
* Yes, that was msdos.sys, as Lee (trallacious) suggested, cuz I cant find that boot.ini anywhere when Lemon13 first suggested it. At first i cant edit it..cuz of the attribute of SHR, so i resorted to removing by Attrib -s -h -r msdos.sys command. Then i saw that autoscan=1 there.
* Yes again, Edfair i will rest that error problems for now and move on but will be wary of all your suggestions. One always learn from other's right or wrong impressions across the miles as the truth always win out in the end! Hidden or not, the process we went thru always lead one step less to the primrose path.
* Yes Trollacious, it seems now that I know what autoscan means as U all described it ("scan for scandisk at start") I might take note on boot up if it will get turned off or on again, and go from there once again.
* Yes, Stduc, I will also check that scandisk.log and those dos-based commands(scandisk/chkdsk) & choice parameters sometimes just for curiousity.

Way to go guys, thanks
rBen