Two Hard drives - Scandisk fails both

[Rewired]

My wife's computer would not boot into WIndows 98SE without running Scandisk complete with a physical scan. The physical scan found a lot of bad clusters on the Maxtor 4.2GB drive. I replaced the drive with a WD 5.1GB drive that I had removed from another machine around 6 months ago. I reformatted the drive and installed Windows 98. Everything seemed to be going OK and then it started again. Windows would not boot completely. Windows suspected I had bad clusters. I ran scandisk and it found nothing. I ran Norton Disk Doctor and it found nothing. But I cannot boot to Windows without first going through Scandisk.

Yes I know I can exit Scandisk and continue to Windows, which is what I do 3/4ths of the time. But I should not have to do that. It makes me wonder if the original drive was actually OK. I have tried running the drive from the on board IDE as well as a Promise controller card and get the same result.

Any ideas?

 

[SYAR2003]

Could be bad connection ide cable / connector pins .
Try cleaning the connectors in the ide socket .

Windows 98 setup witout scandisk
setup /IS

 

[wolluf]

Have you run a full scandisk in windows (rather than dos version at startup)?

Have you downloaded manufacturer's diagnostic utility to check disk out (should be one on Western Digital's website).

 

[Rewired]

Syar2003 and wolluf:

Thanks for the responses. I don't think it is the IDE cable or IDE connector as I have had the same behavior running from the on-board IDE 1 channel as well as the IDE 1 channel on a Promise Ultra 100TX2 controller card. I used different cables when I did this. I have not run the WD diagnostics yet. I planned to do that next. I have run scandisk as well as NDD both from the command prompt and from within Windows. With the original HDD (Maxtor) bad sectors were found and marked. On the replacement HDD (WD) neither of the diagnostics ever found anything.

Since the WD hard drive was working fine when I removed it a few months ago, I am wondering if it could be a problem with the power supply or power regulation. If I get a chance I will try switching out the ATX power supply and see if that does anything.

Any other thoughts?

 

[multarnc]

The scandisk at windows startup doesn't do very much. Run a full scan within Windows. You can disable the scan on startup, by going to Start - Programs - Accessories - System Tools - System Information
When that loads, click on the Tools menu - then System Configuration Utility.
There will be a startup tab where you can do selective startup. Uncheck the box for running the scandisk on bad startups.

 

[kewlcoder]

well, do n't run any full scans, do you need some thing from that hard drive, then use it as a slave on some other machine and copy those files and then use disk wizard and run Zero FILL , if bad sectors are not removable then you will get an error. else it will be rectified, it might be the problem with improper cable. and how is you power suply, i guess you should check that once ... many chances are that a faulty power suply can ruin your computer hard drives.