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Drive Hangs - Drive Not Ready Error

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by mark 2 views

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I have an HD that is hanging while doing a surface scan. ScanDisk will hang on Cluster 21,104 and give no message. Norton Disk Doctor will hang at Sector 694,478 and eventually give an error "Drive Not Ready" Retry/Abort. Since neither program will mark the area bad, I can't clone the drive's contents to a new one. Does anyone know of a utility that will use the sector or cluster numbers to mark off an area of the disk as bad so I can get Norton Ghost to skip over this area?

6 replies

by tech_wiz03

if you got a disk manager for the harddisk you can usually have it check/ verify/ nnd mark bad sectors and clsters. Other than than you can get a copy of harddisk mechanic from
http://highgroundsoftware.com to try and repair the drive.

regards
rick

by mark

My question states that the disk managers are not seeing bad sectors. The drive merely turns off when hitting these sectors. I want to manually mark them bad so the drive doesn't try to use them and won't hang up on software that tries to.

by dmiles

DFSee- Disk analysis and repair utility ([V]FAT[32], HPFS, NTFS).

unrated [added 1998-07-05 updated 2001-05-01]

07-24-01: beginning with v4.0, DFSEE is now pay shareware.

Display File Systems is a comprehensive disk sector and file systems information/ repair utility for power users. Handles information from HPFS, NTFS and various FAT partitions. Includes OS/2, DOS and NT versions. Capabilities include sector reading, du mping and editing, bad sector scanning, sector checksums, file system analysis (e.g., displays errors in FS), MBR walking, file recovery, clear partition-tables sectors (MBR/EBR), clear LVM information sectors and/or all partition boot-records...and so on. Recent versions include an FDISK module that also supports the OS/2 bootmanager...."you can FDISK your system from a DOS diskette, without any user intervention....reboot and restart a particular partition from DOS or Windows NT. Virtual disks allow exper imenting with partitions without modifying the real physical disk.

Last freeware version was 3.42 (05-2001)

ftp://ftp.uni-koeln.de/pc/msdos/diskutils/dfsee342.zip (858K)

by mark

I wasted a couple hours trying the utility. It may be capable, but I could not figure out how to mark off the sector. It did scan and give me a single bad sector at LSN:000A9916 CYL45 H224 S39, and it did not hang like the other 3 utilities. However I still cannot figure out how to mark this sector off as bad. If you know the command syntax, please provide it.

by mark

You know what happens when you ASSuME. I assumed that since the disk utilities would not work, that Norton Ghost would also hang. When I tried Ghost, it paused for a long while at the bad spot, but eventually finished. Oddly, restoring the image to the drive got the system working again and a surface scan showed no bad spots. Weird, but if it works, I'm not asking.

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