Clusters

[jason69uk]

can someone name me all the things that could mess up a hard disk drive?

I know fragments, viruses, clusters so far is there anything else..oh yeah i know of over heating..

Also is there any really good tools to deal with bad clusters and sectors??

cheers

[reboot]

Most manufacturer's have tools to ressurect semi-dead drives.
The best I've found, is Spinrite, from www.grc.com

[Soopafresh]

Spinrite is great. The downside is that it takes a LONG, LONG, LONG time.

[reboot]

Yeah, I guess it depends on how badly you want to ressurect the drive. I have an old p133 I use, and let it run for 2 or 3 days

[jason69uk]

this aint likely to screw things up tho isit installing this prog cos it says press cb4 installation to REP what drive u wanna uncluster..

this prog aint guna affect the way windows start up either isit..cheers

also what r the other things to mess drives up so far i know, viruses would, but what else i know heat, clusters and fragments would but what else

[reboot]

Power brownouts. Can cause the head(s) to scrape the platters.
Spinrite in NO way affects the current data on a hard drive. It simply attempts to analyze the drive, and fix anything it possibly can. If you have data in the corrupt portions of the disk, THIS may be destroyed, but spinrite attempts to fix this too.
RTFM. It's all there.

[jason69uk]

cheers, sorry to sound dumb but whats a power brownout..just the electricity in the home going off??

Yeah going back to this spinrite proggie i do have an existing O/S on here i have C:\windows (old OS) but am now using C:\winxp as new OS it said it will delete the old one b4 i installed that..i dont think i shd install it because i have installed software since then that by default the dll files could end up in the system files of the old OS..wait a sec ill tell u what it said..

Warning: ANY EXISTING OPERATING SYSTEM ON THIS DRIVE WILL BE LOST.

Which kinda tells me maybe i shouldn't install it..

Ya know......

[reboot]

Change your options.
You can have it analyze and repair without destroying anything.
I guess it depends on how bad you want this drive back in working condition.
I would slave it, ghost it, fix it, then ghost back.

[jason69uk]

Slave it as make it the slave yeah??
Ghost it as in copy the contents of it to another drive??
Fix it with spinrite and disk keeper??
then copy the contents of the driv eback i copied it to??

[reboot]

Yup.
It won't be bootable if you just "copy the contents", but a quick restore with the original install disk usually works. This is why I suggested Ghost.