First post, by 386SX
Hi,
I've this Seagate ST3660 520MB hard disk that is installed intoa 386DX40 machine on UMC chipset and UMC based I/O isa controller along with GD5429 isa vga, Yamaha YMF719, msdos 6.2 and Win 3.1. I remember when I bought this second hand disk I think I only saw a single cluster having problems, but lately while I got less than half of the space left on the disk, installation after installation, I begin to see strange writing (abort,retry,ignore etc..) errors while copying bigger files.
I did again a checkit disk test and a scandisk surface test and it reports that more or less "18 graphical blocks * 98 each = n° clusters" has been flagged with the damaged/bad letter while checkit program notice some msdos file errors both at the "middle" of the process/disk.
Is this normal for such 1995 disk and for this kind of hardware? I read that it was usual for old disks to have factory damaged clusters but I didn't know it and I suppose not that many. Might it be I pushed the I/O controller speed too much in the bios (I/O recovery time goes from 12 BCLK to 2 BCLK) or simply filling up the disk with data I'm finding disk problems?
The disk is set in the bios with the right 1057/16/63 settings but formatted is seen as 1024 cylinders I suppose from the msdos fdisk/format utility.
Also once flagged as bad clusters, are they simply unused/skipped or the o.s. might try to write again or read again from/on those ones?
Thanks