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ray
03-01-2001, 07:50 PM
Hello,
I wonder if anyone has seen this before.Today,I went to a friends to format the hard disk in an old machine of his.It is a 504mb disk as I recall.I started the usual format procedure using the dos format command.All started well,then all of a sudden the words 'trying to recover allocation units' (or something very similiar) came up.Its still,hours later,counting slowly through these 'allocation units'.I thought that an allocation unit was actually a cluster.The only thing I can think of - and this is only a guess - is that there are a lot of bad sectors on this disk.I've never seen this message before.
I'd be real interested to know what you guys think!
Thanks,and all the best,
Ray

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Now that I have achieved A+ certification,I realise how much there is still to learn...
Paleo Pete
03-02-2001, 05:25 AM
Yep, it means a lot of bad clusters on the drive. Get ready to replace it. Start running scandisk fairly often and see if it keeps finding more bad clusters every time, if so it's definitely going bye bye.

I like running scandisk from a DOS prompt, with this command for an unattended operation:

scandisk_c:_/autofix_/nosummary_/surface using spaces in place of the underscores ( _ ) used here. That lets scandisk run on automatic without all the pop up prompts and runs a surface scan as well.

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Randy_tx
03-02-2001, 09:40 AM
When I get that message on a hard drive.......the FIRST thing I do is move the important data to another hard drive ASAP.......that baby is going ...esp being that old to begin with.

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"As hard as a rock & dumb as a brick"...Windows CEMeNT
ray
03-04-2001, 12:22 PM
Thank you Paleo Pete and Randy_TX. I'll tell my friend the good news!
Thanks,and best wishes,
Ray

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Now that I have achieved A+ certification,I realise how much there is still to learn...