In message "dr. Imre Bartfai" wrote: > plant some times ago. And as info for HDD reliability: I had a 40GB Maxtor > HDD, which crashed very nasty: bad sectors, and a total mix up of an ext3 > filesystem, so practically no way to recover the data. Let me guess. Maxtor 5T040H4? I had a 5T040H4 fail a few years ago - it stopped spinning. Funny thing is, if you held the PC's RESET button in for a few seconds the drive would squeal a few times, then make a click (probably the head-lock disengaging), then the motor would start spinning. Maxtor did an advance RMA on the drive. It died completely while I was copying its contents onto the replacement. To Maxtor's credit, the replacement was fine - it's a 6L080J4 - yes, an 80GB. Turns out the warehouse ran out of 40GB UltraATA-100 drives, so they sent out the next one up - an 80GB UltraATA-133. Absolutely lightning fast :) Incidentally, I've got a 386 sitting next to me - 386DX-40, math coprocessor, 8MB RAM, 8x CDROM, two serial ports, 16-bit soundcard... and a 4GB Seagate U4 hard drive. What does the 386 run? DR-DOS 7.03, Protel Autotrax, Turbo C++ and MPASM. Now if only I had a DOS driver for my wisp628... > However, I did not > want to dump the drive so made a short look. Maxtor offers on their > website a HDD repair program. I downloaded and ran it, and it cleaned up > the drive perfectly. Since there (6 months) the drive runs without any > problem (incl. badtracks). Misterious, eh? If a drive starts displaying bad sectors, it's probably on its last legs. I usually start backing data up to CD-R when the drive shows a single bad sector (or flags a SMART Diagnostic Error), then RMA it post-haste. Later. -- Phil. | Acorn Risc PC600 Mk3, SA202, 64MB, 6GB, philpem@dsl.pipex.com | ViewFinder, 10BaseT Ethernet, 2-slice, http://www.philpem.dsl.pipex.com/ | 48xCD, ARCINv6c IDE, SCSI ... So many idiots... too few flame-throwers... -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.