yawetaG wrote on 2020-09-10, 17:44:

Looks like my main retro system's boot disk (21 years old 4GB Quantum Fireball) failed today...the system won't boot into Windows anymore and complains of corrupted directories. It suggested running ScanReg, which hung itself. Scandisk shows some bad sectors and appears to not be able to get past a certain point when running a surface scan 🙁

It had shown some increasing signs of instability in the last couple of months. Guess I now know why...

Edit: Ah, it looks like Scandisk is just very slow. Guess I'll let it run overnight and see the damage tomorrow (I suspect that I'll have to reinstall Windows because one of the bad clusters hit the Windows drivers folder...).

Close to three hours later, and I'm at 5 more bad clusters (it already had 5) and it's busy with a sixth found right after the fifth. The last two bad clusters have been keeping it busy for close to an hour now. Scandisk is at 90% of the drive...

(and I want to go to sleep)

Do not do that scanning/fixing does not help at all and takes so long, scan is destroying more of your hard drive in the process, best way is to identify what files that was ruined by the bad sectors and replace those after backing up the hard drive to another.

Cheers,

agreed, if you have ANY errors on a spinning rust drive, pull the data and toss the drive. MFM is a different beast that doesn't necessarily apply to this rule.

luckybob wrote on 2020-09-10, 21:09:

agreed, if you have ANY errors on a spinning rust drive, pull the data and toss the drive. MFM is a different beast that doesn't necessarily apply to this rule.

It really depends on the drive. I've got another drive in the same system that has had some bad clusters for over 15 years and never got any new ones (a Maxtor 🤣).

I don't really expect that I can salvage the Windows installation on the 4 GB drive. Likely I will delete the partitions, repartition and reformat, and reinstall. If more bad clusters pop up during the reformatting, I'll chuck the faulty drive and reinstall on the other drive (but will have to backup my SimCity 3000 cities first).

And my point remains. If its an ide or scsi drive with bad sectors, it should be replaced. Even if its just retro gaming. The time required dealing with bad sectors and possible failures just isn't worth the effort.

Oh, probably, but what I do with my time is up to myself, ain't it? 😉

So... 8 bad clusters, system.dat and user.dat and a CAB file unreadable. Brilliant. 😁

No. Get another hard drive. Not worth your time worrying about keeping using a dying drive, data is.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-09-10, 21:46:

No. Get another hard drive. Not worth your time worrying about keeping using a dying drive, data is.

Cheers,

None of the 'important' data is on that drive. In as much as a bunch of savegames are important. I mean, I have data that is much more important than that, and that data has multiple copies spread over multiple machines...

I learned the lesson of segregating data and operating system a very long time ago.

And just to kill off this discussion: I know that using a dying hard drive is probably a bad idea. But one has to take the time for new experiences, and I've had much luck with hard disks in general. This is my first such failure in 30 years (!) 😁

Wow.

I had few failures over the years.

Cheers,

yawetaG wrote on 2020-09-10, 21:19:

luckybob wrote on 2020-09-10, 21:09:

agreed, if you have ANY errors on a spinning rust drive, pull the data and toss the drive. MFM is a different beast that doesn't necessarily apply to this rule.

It really depends on the drive. I've got another drive in the same system that has had some bad clusters for over 15 years and never got any new ones (a Maxtor 🤣).

I also had a Maxtor HDD for about 10 years with a single bad sector and never developed any other, however the bad sector was the boot sector, so no OS would boot from it 🙁 . The drive eventually died due to a bad PS.

luckybob wrote on 2020-09-10, 21:38:

And my point remains. If its an ide or scsi drive with bad sectors, it should be replaced. Even if its just retro gaming. The time required dealing with bad sectors and possible failures just isn't worth the effort.

Remember the good ole days.

Been a while since I posted here, I moved recently and went out and I think for something like $90 I got this commercial grade shelf, the supports, slats, and other mounting hardware to fill my office closet.

Potato quality because old smartphone, dropped my S7, shattering the LCD.

Bonus pic of my son, grabbing a box of diskettes and making his own seat out of a 386 to play with them:

Oh man.. I look at that photo and the ultraprotective parent in me starts screaming in my head "That breadbin, it will fall onto the toddler's foot!".

Meh, it's counterweighed by the large and heavy AC adapter, plus the VIC is light and also that styrofoam softens the blow.

I'm of the adage of leaving the child to find out for himself. I've seen him about to get a boo boo on a a number of occasions and let it happen - how else is he gonna learn? I don't want to hover over him and protect him till he's in his mid 30s. And guess what - it works. He learns, he's a cautious explorer.

Obviously things like running off with my screwdrivers or leaving sharps on the edge of the countertops are no-gos, I'm not negligent, but a helicopter parent I am not.

aha2940 wrote on 2020-09-10, 23:59:

I also had a Maxtor HDD for about 10 years with a single bad sector and never developed any other, however the bad sector was the boot sector, so no OS would boot from it 🙁 . The drive eventually died due to a bad PS.

Half the Maxtors I've owned had bad sectors on them. Sometimes, I get lucky and they're at the end of the partition, so a 120MB drive becomes a 90MB drive.

Still, I am of the firm belief that Maxtor drives, overall, are of low quality. If I have a retro system I care about, it'll have a WD in there.

20 years Hitachi 160 GB HDD. Still strong.

I use Hitachi HDDs everywhere in my retro PCs.

Jed118 wrote on 2020-09-11, 12:24:

aha2940 wrote on 2020-09-10, 23:59:

I also had a Maxtor HDD for about 10 years with a single bad sector and never developed any other, however the bad sector was the boot sector, so no OS would boot from it 🙁 . The drive eventually died due to a bad PS.

Half the Maxtors I've owned had bad sectors on them. Sometimes, I get lucky and they're at the end of the partition, so a 120MB drive becomes a 90MB drive.

Still, I am of the firm belief that Maxtor drives, overall, are of low quality. If I have a retro system I care about, it'll have a WD in there.

Funny, generally speaking I had good luck with Maxtor and Quantum hard drives (they were very common around here). The few WD drives I used back in the day died soon, so I do not like them.

I have a 560 MB Samsung drive and a 30 GB IBM drive, both with a couple of bad sectors. They have had them for more then 20/15 years now and they still work and seem more or less stable. So they seem to defy the norm. But on the other hand, I don’t run then daily of course because they are in retro systems.

yawetaG wrote on 2020-09-10, 21:42:

Oh, probably, but what I do with my time is up to myself, ain't it? 😉

So... 8 bad clusters, system.dat and user.dat and a CAB file unreadable. Brilliant. 😁

And it can be chucked out. Primary partition impossible to format, other half of disk formats very slowly with errors.

It also made an unpleasant *CLUNK* upon starting the system (hard drives should not do *CLUNK*). I now realize I heard that earlier this month too (head moving violently into parking position, probably...).

Probably luckybob is thinking "Told you so" 😉

SimCity 2000 data safeguarded (600 cities or so...) 😁

Now to decide what to do next...replace with SSD via adapter or CompactFlash?

Last night was experiment time - messing with a $10 mSATA to 44pin IDE kit - trying out some old mSATA drives from old Dell laptops in this thing on my various 486 computers (basically the DX4-100 and the 2 Versas). Initially the plan is to try this out and see if I can get it working on the NECs, and if so, then get it working on both and get a second mSATA to 44pin adapter and build a second 128GB SSD for the other Versa. I did get it working on the DX4-100 desktop just fine - FreeDOS 2.1 installs in like....10 minutes with a full install, and boots almost instantaniously - the Versas....well....that's another story.

Somewhere along the way the DX4-100's 5.25" Mobile rack broke (Lian-Li RH27 unit), so I had to pull the IDE and power cables and run them direct to the drive (sigh). Looks like another repair on the horizon.

Same drive, same DDO (Seagate's, a version of OnTrack I believe), same O/S, neither Versa can find the boot sector or the drive. Planning to try out some Samsungs over the weekend and see how they work, if not, might just throw the SSD into the main box.