getting past Scandisk

Post #11,788 by bconnors 10/4/01 2:13:15 PM Reply	getting past Scandisk As Darrell Spice mentioned in another forum, the hard drive in the PC he helped me put together crashed hard last weekend. Now, whenever I try to boot up, it goes into Scandisk. That's acceptable, since several runs have flagged over 300 clusters in a 1.2 Gig drive as bad. The best it did was progress over some bad spots to lock up at cluster 39090 (out of 3911x). BUT... Ever since then, whether I reboot right after a lock or wait several hours, it will no longer progress beyond previously marked bad spots. Now it keeps sticking in the 37K cluster range. I've kept hoping that it would go beyond the clusters marked as bad to the ones it hasn't yet tested. No luck. Questions: 1. Is there any way to get Scandisk to "jump" over spots that it has already marked as bad? 2. Is there a way to boot off a floppy and force the PC to see the hard drive long enough so I can recover some files off it? When it boots with a system disk in drive A:\\ it doesn't know that a hard drive exists. 3. Can I pull the drive, slave it in another machine, and somehow recover any of the desired files? BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,789 by Steven A S 10/4/01 2:21:43 PM Reply	You can but try What's the best it can do? Allow you to recover your files What's the worst it can do? Continue to prevent you from accessing it ~~~)-Steven----
Post #11,795 by Silverlock 10/4/01 2:40:10 PM Reply	Norton Utilities Spinrite, MACE utilities, etc. Lots of disk tools out there. I'll look around and see if I can find my old copy of Norton Disk Doctor. Run it from a boot floppy and you get a much finer degree of control over how the scan is performed. If you have a boot floppy with the right files, you might want to try running fdisk, blowing away the partition info and recreating it followed by reformatting. For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong H. L. Mencken, Mencken's Metalaw
Post #11,797 by ChrisR 10/4/01 2:45:19 PM Reply	Boot to DOS And run the DOS version of scandisk.
Post #11,906 by bconnors 10/5/01 10:13:55 AM Reply	I don't have the DOS version of Scandisk All of our machines here at work are NT 4.0, and the "Find" function doesn't see any file called "Scandisk.*" anywhere. What did M$ change the name of Scandisk to under NT? I could try running that instead. BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,953 by Silverlock 10/5/01 2:01:48 PM Reply	Formatted how? If it is NTFS, you are are going to need a special boot floppy in order to access the hard drive. Not cheap. Unless the open source community has something or you can find a shareware product, the one I know about costs around $250. [link\|http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/ntfsdospro.asp\|[link\|http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/ntfsdospro.asp\|http://www.winterna...fsdospro.asp]] For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong H. L. Mencken, Mencken's Metalaw
Post #11,981 by bconnors 10/5/01 3:39:12 PM Reply	FAT16 This company is "trailing" edge, nothing near "leading" or even "bleeding" edge. Most everybody here is NT 4.0, SP4, like my machine. So what did the microbrains in Redmond call ScanDisk under NT? BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,987 by Silverlock 10/5/01 4:27:30 PM Reply	Doesn't matter If it's FAT16, just get yourself over to a 95/98 box, make a boot floppy and copy the scandisk of the box to the floppy. If that still doesn't do it, take Ashtons excellent advice and get a copy of spinrite. For every human problem, there is a neat, simple solution; and it is always wrong H. L. Mencken, Mencken's Metalaw
Post #12,047 by static 10/6/01 2:06:54 AM Reply	chkdsk I know chkdsk got a bad name but that was just the DOS version. The NT version should be much better, but I don't know what it's like on FAT16 partitions. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #12,066 by Andrew Grygus 10/6/01 12:20:03 PM Reply	Heck, with FAT16 you could use any chkdsk . . . . including the DR-DOS and OS/2 chkdsk. For FAT32 I have a Win95 boot disk with the MS-DOS 7.0 Scandisk. That will work with FAT16 too. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #11,804 by tseliot 10/4/01 3:51:19 PM Reply	Hit 'X'? ie--stop the scandisk program when it starts? That's her, officer! That's the woman that programmed me for evil!
Post #11,907 by bconnors 10/5/01 10:19:10 AM Reply	Doesn't work It forces me into Scandisk early in the boot process; once there, trying to hit the "Exit" or "X" key is irrelevant because it ignores keyboard input. And if I boot to a system floppy, the hard drive doesn't exist as a valid drive letter. Believe me, I've tried every letter from B to Z without success. I keep hoping that it will accept previously marked bad clusters, pass beyond them, and someday let me have access to the hard drive for just an hour or so. BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,944 by tseliot 10/5/01 1:25:52 PM Reply	Is it a USB keyboard? Maybe a PS/2 kb would get a higher interrupt. That's her, officer! That's the woman that programmed me for evil!
Post #11,947 by bconnors 10/5/01 1:46:25 PM Reply	Re: Is it a USB keyboard? Nope - just a good old-fashioned regular keyboard. BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,813 by Ashton 10/4/01 4:31:53 PM Reply	y'know - SpinRite was invented for precisely this And I'd bet a bucket of warm spit / or a CD of WinXP (same thing): that most of those er 'bad clusters' would go away with its beaucoup massaging.. (yes it also rewrites the base format along the way, a cylinder at a time. Sometimes a missing domain on a lo-level marker - can confuse Any M$ kinda thing) And.. ya don't lose your data, from MBR >>> on. And.. oh, lots. Just a thought. Ashton
Post #11,908 by bconnors 10/5/01 10:20:33 AM Reply	Is that program still available somewhere? BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,909 by Steve Lowe 10/5/01 10:23:15 AM Reply	Absolutely [link\|http://grc.com/spinrite.htm\|http://grc.com/spinrite.htm] ----- Steve
Post #11,979 by bconnors 10/5/01 3:35:53 PM Reply	Contacted SpinRite support at lunchtime And they emailed me this response: "Because ScanDisk keeps freezing, most likely SpinRite will run into the same problem! SpinRite is not a "file structure re-builder". It will not find and recover data that's been lost due to a destroyed FAT or partition table." So it sounds like, even if I rebuild the FAT from scratch, SpinRite can't help me recover any files. BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #11,827 by wharris2 10/4/01 7:57:35 PM Reply	Scandisk = bucket of warm spit Who knows how empty the sky is In the place of a fallen tower. Who knows how quiet it is in the home Where a son has not returned. -- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)
Post #11,865 by Andrew Grygus 10/4/01 11:25:40 PM Reply	I handled a rash of hard disks Windows couldn't see. I attached them as a second drive on a Linux box and mounted them as Windows filesystems. Linux liked them just fine, and I copied all the files off and burned CD-ROMs for the customers. This reminds me also back before Windows, several clients had DOS hard disks MS-DOS stopped booting. Couldn't fix them without reformat (which the customers wouldn't allow due to unbacked data). SYSing MS-DOS didn't fix anything, so I SYS'd those suckers with DR-DOS and they worked fine. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #12,001 by Ashton 10/5/01 6:10:49 PM Reply	Thanks! - added to doomsday folder.. Hmm DRDOS better able to handle a boot anomaly ?! - could that be anything related to the media descriptor byte being handled with more er "class", d'ya think? (I once played a bit in that area on some floppies; IIRC could render disk unuseable, unformattable - right around that byte. If you left disk editor and tried to reaccess that floppy: no dikes.) Nice twist of the digital knife - nix mounting DOS, where DOS fears to even let you peek.. What an 'industry' - myopic not-engineered-here assholes everywhere! A. But I still recall Don Evans reengineering the one analog* part of the MPU in the PDP-8 (!) maybe the ALU? -- and tossing in an FET (IIRC) to linearize conversion better.. cackle cackle
Post #12,305 by bconnors 10/8/01 4:51:06 PM Reply	latest update Well, I've brought a diskette from home that has both ScanDisk and Chkdsk from my Win98 box. Booted the PC to a diskette, then swapped in the disk with these 2 programs on it. Tried to run both of them, and got the same error message: (Paraphrasing) "This program will only work on a device that has Windows 95 or later." The hard drive is Win 98, the utilities are from a box that has Win 98 SE, so what in the world would cause such a stupid message to appear. Friggin' M$!!! Even though the wife will get pissed at me, I'm going out a buying a case, motherboard and AMD CPU, and tossing the dead hard drive; I've wasted too much time on it already. Recommendations, anyone? BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #12,320 by Andrew Grygus 10/8/01 5:52:35 PM Reply	What OS sys'd the floppy? It has to be made on a Win95/98 machine. DOS 6.3 won't work. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #12,346 by bconnors 10/8/01 8:55:22 PM Reply	Windoze 98 original version BConnors "Prepare for metamorphosis. Ready, Kafka?"
Post #12,361 by wharris2 10/8/01 10:19:44 PM Reply	I hate these misspells, isn't it Winblows? Who knows how empty the sky is In the place of a fallen tower. Who knows how quiet it is in the home Where a son has not returned. -- Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

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