Using a damaged HD ?

[Moose]

I have a damaged 2GB HD which I have managed to salvage and use as slave (on my kids' PC). CHKDSK reported physical errors on the drive, and so the only workaround I could manage which allowed me to continue using the bulk of the disk was to use FDISK to create one primary (D) and one extended partition with a single logical drive (E). E is in normal use, but D is minute (4MB I think), and has been left unformatted.

Their C drive is 500MB, ancient and clunky... I'd rather use the bigger drive to work from - quicker and quieter! (They can then use their smaller drive for data backup!)

http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif So - is there a way I can format the 2GB HD that completely ignores the first few MB, creates a C (primary) drive from which W95/DOS can boot?

Is there any milage in pursuing multiple bootable primary drives and marking the working one as ACTIVE ?

I do have PQ Partition Magic 2.0 available - but couldn't see a way to avoid the start of the disk.

[Paleo Pete]

If chkdsk or scandisk report errors, and they can't be fixed, you're probably flogging a dead horse. I would say don't use the drive, except as a neat paperweight.

Try running scandisk from a boot floppy and see what it comes up with before retiring it.

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[sleddog]

I had exactly the same situation as you -- except mine was a 6.4gb disk. I used PQ Magic to create a primary, unformatted partition in the first 500mb of the drive -- where all the errors were -- marked it as hidden so Windows didn't see it, then partitioned and formatted the rest of the drive. Worked fine for about a month then errors began appearing at other places. Within a couple days it died a thrashing, clunking death. For your peace of mind I would also recommend you ditch this harddrive.

Afterthought: I should've mentioned that I was using my disk as a slave, not as a master with the OS installed.

[This message has been edited by sleddog (edited 12-25-2000).]