Hardware/Windows question

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 04:16:09PM -0400, Fairlight wrote:
> I am unsure if you can even get the MBR relocated with a bad sector
> mapping.  Generally by the time a drive does something like this to me,
> it's swapped outta there for a reliable one.

You can't.  The MBR is epxected to be in it's location by the BIOS
code, which doesn't know from remapping (minor lie: if a SCSI drive
relocates 0/0 without telling you, you'll never notice).

> It's possible to try rewriting the MBR, but I'd advise against it.  If it's
> really that section of disk that's bad, if it fails it will not boot again,
> period.  Best off backing up what you can and replacing the drive.

If that's crazy problematic, though, you might grab Spinrite 6 (which
is only about $70, I think) and run it against the drive on Level 5.

I've had Spinrite recover drives that just would not work at all; it
will just keep reading until it gets the sector, on it's highest
setting.  I once ran it to recover an un-backed up ST512 10MB drive on
a PC-XT.  It took *10 days*.  (Yes, I put it on a UPS :-)

It got every sector back.

Course, I backed everything up and moved it to a new drive *anyway*,
but...

Steve Gibson is a self important a-hole... but he writes some *damn*
fine assembly code.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
Designer                          Baylink                             RFC 2100
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	"NPR has a lot in common with Nascar... we both turn to the left."
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