"The Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!"


(?) The Answer Guy (!)


By James T. Dennis, answerguy@ssc.com
LinuxCare, http://www.linuxcare.com/


(?) Try Linux ... and Grammar

From firefly on Mon, 14 Jun 1999

hi dont know if you can help me so ill run my problem by ya!

i just bought a8.4gig samsung drv i put it in as a slave and used partition magic to partition it 4k clusters......2gig/5gigand 1.4gig rebooted and installed win 95b

when itryed to use files form the hdd thsy had errors so i thought though ill format the drv and start again..... i removed all partitions and rebooted with a boot disk95ver and it started to format when it got too 27% it started saying. TRYING TO RECOVER FILE ALLOCATION UNITS now scandisk says ive got bad clusters...could you tell me whats happening here?

thanks g.lishman

(!) Sounds like a bad drive, bad cable, or bad controller (not to mention a bad keyboard actuator).
It could be some incompatibility between the slave and master (some IDE drives cannot co-exist in some combinations on an IDE channel). Try running it on the other IDE channel that you'll find in most recent PCs. (Configure the new drive as standalone or as the master to your IDE/ATAPI CD-ROM if you have one on that channel). Make sure to try a fresh drive cable.
You might also try using some punctuation and capitalization in your messages. This is not IRC. When you ask volunteers (such as me) to provide the technical support that your vendor was supposed to have sold you, the least you can do is spend a little extra time on your message. It's best if you can give the impression that you've done a bit of research and made some attempt to find the answer on your own.
Naturally you could also try installing Linux on this drive. Linux has a neat utility called 'badblocks' which can be used by itself and which is called by our filesystem creation and filesystem check utilities (mke2fs and e2fsck among others). After all, I'm the LINUX GAZETTE "Answer Guy" not the "my Samsung IDE hard drive doesn't work with Microsoft Windows '95 rev B answer guy."


Copyright © 1999, James T. Dennis
Published in The Linux Gazette Issue 43 July 1999
HTML transformation by Heather Stern of Starshine Techinical Services, http://www.starshine.org/


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