Need help with hard drive format.

[austin316]

Ok, I put the Windows '98 boot up disk in the drive, fired up the computer and typed in format c: It then said all data on the drive will be lost and I hit 'Y' and then enter. Next, it came up stating that it is "trying to recover allocation unit" and these numbers start moving really slowly. What the heck does that mean? Am I screwed?

 

[Acetate]

What that means is that your hard drive has some bad clusters on it. DOS will try to mark those clusters unwrittable..
I have had many drives in the past with bad clusters, and those drives didn't last long.
From my experience, once a hard drive begins to fail, it doesn't stop (it grows over time).
Your best bet is to order a replacement part ASAP, or else your data will become corrupt.

And yes.. Format does take a damn long time to mark those clusters!

Goodluck.

 

[DrZone]

I thought that bad clusters appeared because of natural wear and tear of the hard drive. I dont think it means that it's definitely going to fail soon.

 

[Willoughbyva]

I agree with acetate. Every time I had some bad clusters in format the drive didn't last no more than a month or two max. Usually it starts failing right away.

Get a new drive if it is at all possiable.


Will

 

[Lord Evermore]

There's no such thing as "normal wear and tear" to the physical media. Nothing should ever touch that, and reading and writing data can't "wear out" the magnetic properties of the media. Drives are factory tested to make sure that the coating of magnetic particles is consistent and isn't coming off the platter. However it is possible after time for a defect to become apparent that was not found during testing (or in fact for a head to crash but not immediately fail, though that can't be common. That's when you develop bad sectors. Once you develop one bad sector, chances are good that the defect is not limited to just that one sector, so you're likely to start getting more and more. It's safer to just replace the whole thing right away.

Much older drives I think were more likely to have bad sectors, and it wasn't quite as imperative to replace the drive. One could assume that once it was marked bad and no longer used, it was probably just a defect in that sector and everything else would usually be fine.

Think of it this way: would you continue using a floppy disk for important data if a format found a few bad blocks?

Format is slow as can be no matter what you're doing. If you happen to have any other utilities handy (like PartitionMagic) they can usually scan a drive faster and mark them bad faster.