another dead HD, which do you use?

I go through 2 drives per year on average. The main problem is heat. The hotter they get, the shorter they last. In a notebook there is not much you can do about, except choose the slowest, choose the one with least capacity.

I found the 40GB 2.5" notebook drives to be much more reliable than the 80GB ones. 60GB is also a good choice.

The 350Gs are no joke. 100Gs are reached pretty quick on hard surfaces. EG when the drives is alone standing on the table on its long side surface and flips to its top or botton surface, this alone exceeded 100Gs. So instead of mounting the drives in rigid mounts they'd better be mounted with some shock absorbers.

Rene

Yup. . .

I notice that you didn't say that you tried to re-partition the disks. I think your problem is the copy-protection scheme that AutoDesk has subscribed to: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:tm29RZkNr3cJ:

If you treat it as a boot-sector virus (WHICH IT IS) and use FDISK, I think you will find that you are able to re-use the HDDs.

"martin griffith" skrev i en meddelelse news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Whatever happen to cost below USD 150 for 120 G and is Silent. And Backups.

All PeeCee hardware is made in the same three factories and it is all crap to begin with.

So it might as well be cheap to replace.

Maybe so, I just know both drives now have lotsa bad blocks, and this is coincident with having the monitor right beside the PC case. The drives DO have a few (2 to 5) extra bad blocks with the monitor two feet away, but not the hundreds it had before. I suppose there were a lot of blocks that were made marginal, and some of them are failing.

Perhaps that too, though that's just a few seconds of 60HZ sinewave from a couple of times turning on, whereas the deflection yokes are sawtooths of maybe 80Hz and 30kHz, for hours and hours.

Regardless of the exact cause, these are pretty clearly 'soft errors' (caused by improper magnetic data (bad CRC) recorded to and read from the track, not from physical defects of the media). I heard as far back as 15 years ago you're not supposed to do low-level format of a modern drive (or shouldn't even be able to), but I don't see how to fix it any other way.

Is there something better than Scandisk for W98? If a block can't be read two or three reads, it should be marked bad Scandisk doesn't mark a block bad until several seconds, and there are a lot of 'very slow but good' blocks around the bad blocks. I should look for another newsgroup to ask about this, any suggestions?

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Ahhhh... recall the days of using debug to run a low level format ?

Something like..

debug g=c:8000 < enter >

YW ;-)

Graham

The WinME disk tools (both ScanDisk and Defrag) are much faster and are 100% compatible with 95/98. More @ AXCEL216's site:

You could also go where M$ went to get its (current) disk tool technology: