I used to be able to do this in my sleep, but I’ve long ago thrown out my Win98 toolbox and forgotten just about everything specific to Win98.
A friend has come to me with an ailing laptop that’s been getting slower and slower. First thing I do is put Ad-Aware on it, and find 33 pieces of crud. Next up will be Spybot and AVG antivirus, since the Norton AV hasn’t been updated for two years. :smack:
While it’s creaking along, it truly is creaking along. The hard drive makes a noise similar to the ZIP Click of Death. The DOS/Windows chkdsk churns away for an amazingly long time on the clicky sectors, but reports no bad sectors. Non-clicky sectors get scanned in a jiffy.
Is there any way I can say “Hey, I think these sectors are going bad, so move the data off them and mark 'em bad.” This will serve two purposes - prevent catastrophe and speed up the poor little laptop. With its 133 MHz Pentium II, it needs all the help it can get.
Ah. You said chkdsk, which is a slightly different beast. I don’t think there’s any way to force it to mark flaky clusters as bad. However, there are any number of third-party tools that do a better job, like McAfee Nuts & Bolts 98 or Norton Disk Doctor. N&B in particular was really good at identifying failing clsuters and moving data to good ones. You can probably find a used copy at a considerable discount, at places such as Recycled Software (Which I just checked. They don’t have N&B, but they do have Norton Utilities) and others that deal in used software.
I can’t recommend a product, but I can confirm that Scandisk sucks big time. I used both the Win32 and Dos versions on a known ailing drive - in either case, the disk tried to read the sector over and over and over until it eventually decided it was ok and went to the next one. (I later tried it with the top cover off, with similar results).
My guess was that the drive electronics were hiding sector failures from the OS. That, and scandisks sucks.
You are correct, the drive is failing, The behavior you indicated (ie long scan hang time over clusters but none marked bad) is classic incipient pre-failure mode. The drive really needs to be replaced.
Your main problem is that the notebook is virtually a doorstop at this point , and the question is how much time and money you want to put into a failing old notebook (and believe you me, you can spend plenty of both). You can pick up 4-10 gig replacement 2.5" notebook drives on eBay for very little. Make sure they are 9.5 mm high if that is your drive bay height limitation as some older 2.5 drives are 12 mm high. BTW is it a 233 or a 133 mhz unit? PIIs were never made AFAIK in a 133 mhz speed but started with 233 mhz.
I have had quite good luck with a nifty program called HDD regenerator.
About 1/3 of the time the disk is fixed up to “seemingly” perfect health.*
About 1/3 of the time the disk is fixed up enough that I can at least get the data off.
About 1/3 of the time I’m no worse off than when I started.
For laptop drives that are “slow” due to repeated reading (but no actual disk errors), the percentages are quite good, in my exp.
The free demo mode won’t be of any real use, but I can vouch for this being a worthwhile tool.
But I still consider it a flaky disk that needs to be backed up and replaced.
You’re right - I goofed on the chkdsk / scandisk. chkdsk won’t even run if Windows is running, popping up a message that scandisk must be used.
And you’re right again, I don’t want to invest much time in this anchor. The trick, now, is to tell my friend that what he needs for this laptop is a blacksmith. The laptop you bought for $500 three years ago as a refurbished model is nearing the end of its life.
I tried to install a LAN card, and after the drivers installed and the thing demanded a reboot, the DOS chkdsk invoked itself somehow and ran for about three hours. Seems to have helped as the clicking is gone, even though no bad sectors were reported. Perhaps the drive has “SMART” and is taking care of things in hardware?
It is running pretty well now, at least. Between Spybot and Ad-aware, and replacing the resource-gobbling Norton with AVG, the thing actually gets to the desktop in less than five minutes now. I’m calling this one done.
I used SpinRite to keep my hard drive alive and well for its last days. Hard drive space is so cheap and imaging to CD is so reliable, you may well wonder “what’s the point,” but if you’re stubbornly set on keeping the drive alive, SpinRite will optimize and generally speed up your drive.
My chief complaint is that it was slow - the first time you use it on a limping drive, it can take over 24 hours to go sector-by-sector and fix the problems. But I found that it made my drive run much more smoothly, eliminating the grinding and clicking errors almost entirely.
The drive eventually got too flaky to use – it turned out that my power supply was not giving it enough power and the motors were not quite hitting their marks on successive seeks – but SpinRite kept it alive and tolerable for longer than I would have thought possible.
My solution?
image the disk onto CD now, and once a week until the drive fails
buy SpinRite and keep the drive alive for as long as you can
buy a new drive and wait for the day that you have to make the swap.
