I am testing an old 1999 HP Pavilion system with a 20 GB Maxtor hard
drive. The hard rive is *extremely* sluggish, making lots of
"clattering train tracks" (for lack of a better analogy) sounds during
disk seeks, and takes about 10 minutes just to boot up Windows 98.
I thought the drive might be on the verge of failing, so I ran a full
S.M.A.R.T. test on it, which revealed no problems. Then I ran the real
mode version of DiskScan, which discovered a bunch of bad clusters close
together about halfway through the disk. What I thought was interesting
is that before it came to those bad clusters, it was making its
"clattering" sounds and scanning sluggishly, as when Windows is running,
but on the other side of the group of bad clusters the drive became very
quiet and scanned the remainder of the disk at a more normal rate.
What does this mean? Does it point to some physical damage to the
drive? Is the drive still usable or should it be discarded?
Dave
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