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Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : SeaTools says OK, Scandisk says "no"

FijiJohn
11-14-2003, 05:13 AM
I have an older 4.3 GB Seagate drive from a computer with problems. I ran the (full) SeaTools diagnostic and it says the drive is fine. However, EVERY time I run Scandisk on it, Scandisk says the two FATs di not agree. It also find "lost data" and then says it has fixed both problems. I FDISK'd it, partitioning the drive into two parts and Scandisk says the same things as above on both partitions. I cannot install Win98 on it. The install bombs as soon as it starts copying files to the drive. I'm pretty clear that the drive is bad but why does SeaTools say it is okay? And why just that FAT error? It appears to format just fine.
Midknyte
11-14-2003, 06:37 AM
did you try zapping the drive? there are some weird partition problems that just need a good zapping.

http://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/hddtech/zap.exe
FijiJohn
11-14-2003, 02:00 PM
Yes, I should have mentioned that as well. When I Zap'd the drive Zap instantly stopped with an error of O1HD - unsupported parameter or function call.
Picard
11-14-2003, 02:24 PM
Originally posted by FijiJohn
Yes, I should have mentioned that as well. When I Zap'd the drive Zap instantly stopped with an error of O1HD - unsupported parameter or function call.

That can happen if the drive is not on the onboard ide, or on an ide raid controller. That can also happen if you don't say which drive to zap, or put the wrong number in the command line, a number corresponding to no drive or an atapi drive.
FijiJohn
11-14-2003, 03:16 PM
Yes, but in this case there was only the single IDE drive attached to the first onboard channel, and there was not much choice other than "zap 1".
Picard
11-14-2003, 03:59 PM
Originally posted by FijiJohn
Yes, but in this case there was only the single IDE drive attached to the first onboard channel, and there was not much choice other than "zap 1".

The proper choice, in the situation you describe, is "Zap 0,"
FijiJohn
11-14-2003, 05:48 PM
(Ooops!) Indeed, using 'zap 0' it took less than one second for zap to say the drive had been successfully zapped. However, it clearly wasn't. Even after re-formatting and using wdclear and spending quite some time writing zeros all across the drive, scandisk still finds the two FATs different and fixes them. Then it finds lost data. The surface scan finds no bad blocks but partly used blocks scattered across the entire drive. SeaTools says the drive has no problems - it's just not usable. :rolleyes: