Hard Drive knackered?

[dannyboyo]

I've been given an old laptop to sort out, it's a P366 (don't know the model as I haven't got access to it right now).

Everytime it boots up it always runs scandisk (and shows no errors) after saying the PC wasn't shut down properly, even if it appears to have shut down fine previously.

Also, when I run scandisk within windows, and do a thorough surface check, it gets (after a couple of hours) about 3/4 through and restarts the check.

I've made sure all the resident programs are closed down beforehand.

Also the same happens when trying to defrag, gets about 1/2 way and restarts the defrag.

Has anyone any ideas before a total reformat?

Cheers

Dan

[slinky]

what o/s??

if it's 9x I'd recommend running regclean until it can't clean no more.. (google regclean, it'll turn up!)

also, try running the defrag in safe mode, defrag will always try to restart if something else has a good go at writing to the drive, safe mode should eliminate that and give you a clean run at it..

Short of that, I'm afraid you are probably right, full fdisk & format and see how she gets on..

HTH

slinky

[dannyboyo]

Cheers for the quick reply slinky!

It's Win95. The laptop is ancient and needs a good sorting. The owner has had it for years and never done any maintainance on it!

I checked last night and it's been about 3 years since it's last defrag!

I haven't tried in safe mode yet as I had to shoot down to London to work for a few days, but will phone the missus and get her to have a bash.

Cheers

[annodomini2]

Personally i'd get a bootable copy of win98se, much better os, repartition and format the hdd, and install the new os, if that doesn't work i'd say there's something seriously wrong with something in the hardware.

[slinky]

surely it's easier to work out whether or not there is a hardware fault and then go down the O/S route..

No point in throwing an hour installing 98 @ the problem if the HDD is stuffed!

slinky

[d-man]

The flag that tells Windows to run Scandisk on startup gets stuck on pretty regularly on Win9x boxes.

Unfortunately I can't remember where you go to turn it off as I haven't had to in years. I'll have a hunt around for it...

[roop]

Dan,

Boot into DOS (start machine and as soon as it gets past the POST start hammering on F8 and go to the command prompt only option).

Then run chkdsk /f which will scan the disk for errors and and fix them if it can. Then run scandisk /all which will check all local partitions for problems. If both come back clean, then forget arsing around with the Windows registry, you have have 95/98 installed in 30 minutes flat if it's coming from a reasonable (8x or more) CD drive which is much quicker than faffing with a registry thats clagged up with years worth of crap. Lob in the 9x CD and boot from it, fdisk the drive and remove all exisiting partitions (NB: I am sure you're aware that this will trash everything on the HDD). Make a new partition FAT32 (enable large disk support when prompted) and away you go.

If it's got a decent amount of memory (128MB+) then why not go for W2k / XP. Yes, they are heavier and it'll take a year to load up but it's way more stable than 9x once it gets there. If you go this route, still fdisk and trash existing partitions but make the new partition NTFS.

>> Edited by roop on Wednesday 14th July 21:59

[ErnestM]

There's an MS fix for this somewhere. Apparently, in some cases, 98/98se shuts down the power before allowing enough time for the drive to finish writing from cache...

Look through the MS knowledge base. It seems this particular problem does not rear it's head until you start filling your drive (about 60% or more)...

Cheers

ErnestM

[dannyboyo]

OK, just to fill you all in, I did a defrag sucessfully in safe made with the screensaver off. Also ran scandisk from DOS and found that the drive apparently though it was a different size to what it actually is.

Also deleted about 400 bits of spyware and found 6 viruses!

So I'm going to set a surface test going and bugger off to the pub for a few hours while it's doing it's thing!

Cheers for the help guys.