By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com

Of all the computers I have owned, I have never had a hard drive go bad on one until a few days back. Fortunately, it was on a computer that I really don’t use for much anymore.

The Story I was looking for the most recent version of a Visual Basic program I had written two to three years ago. I had an installed version of the program that said it was version 1.3.3, but version 1.3.2 was the highest version I could find in my VB projects. All of these older VB projects had been created on a Pentium 166 computer bought around 1996, I think. That computer had been retired to a back room last year when I added a Gateway 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 as my main computer to a Compaq 333 and an IBM ThinkPad used as secondary machines.

At that time, I had, I thought, copied all data files from the old Gateway 166 and the Compaq to the new Gateway. So I didn’t really need the old Gateway 166. But it did have installed a collection of older programs that I chose not to transfer to the new Gateway or the Compaq. Programs like WinFaxPro, Corel Draw, Corel Photo-Paint, Micrografx Graphics Suite, Delrina PerForm, Visual Basic 4 ( an older 16 bit version). And it did have my first CD Burner and my first scanner-an HP IIcx (original price, $1,000!). So the old computer could have its uses: scanning legal sized documents, which the newer flat bed scanner ($400) could not do, or using Corel Draw to export Draw documents as Adobe Illustrator documents. The same for exporting Corel Photo-Paint files as Tiff’s or some other graphic format.

Well, I now needed to check the old computer to see if I could find the VB project. So I stretched network cable to it and turned it on. During the boot it produced a message to the effect that there was a problem with some file names or something on one of the drives. So I rebooted, thinking it was just a one time problem. The next time I was informed that Scandisk, which wanted to run because of an improper shutdown, could not run since it could not read some data on drive F. Well, I just opted out of that and moved on and finally got the computer booted to the desktop. But I could tell that things were not running properly. The computer’s reactions were real slow. So I ran Scandisk again on the F drive with similar results.

Time for SpinRite. Recall that SpinRite is supposedly like Scandisk on steroids. I booted from the SpinRite floppy and ran the program to check the F drive. It told me that it found four bad clusters and then proceeded to do its thing. Unfortunately, its thing didn’t get very far, and it said that it couldn’t proceed. So much for SpinRite.

Now drive F is actually on the secondary hard drive in that computer. The main hard drive is partitioned as drives C & E; the secondary drive as drives D, F & G. Logical drives D & G seemed OK, and, of course, the operating system was on the other hard drive entirely. So I still had a computer, but a lot of the programs were installed on drive F.

The more I tried Scandisk on drive F, the worse things got. When I started, I think (unfortunately, I didn’t take notes) I could access parts of F with Windows Explorer. Now F was off limits and would hang the computer when you tried to access it.

I talked the problem over with member Merle Nicholson, and the only solution was to first try and simply reformat F using PartitionMagic. However, that couldn’t be done either. So the final recourse was to use PartitionMagic to delete F. I did that, and it gave me back smooth operation of the computer-I suppose it was no longer spending time trying to communicate with F.

Before deleting F, I had tried to uninstall the programs installed there, but that was a no go. So after deleting it I tried again. A few allowed me to do this; others said that they couldn’t find their files, but they would remove themselves from the startup menu; and the ones that had used InstallShield as an installation program wouldn’t do anything.

I suspect that the rest of the second hard drive will eventually exhibit the same problems. But the original drive is fine, and I still have the old computer-and, by the way, I found that VB project on drive C.

I wonder if letting a computer sit unused for a long time can cause such hard drive problems. I hadn’t put power to that computer in several months. I had another computer that I let sit for several months, and then on trying to boot it found that the video card had gone bad. Another older computer that had sat for about six months with no use wouldn’t boot properly since it had lost its CMOS data for the hard drive due to a failed CMOS battery.

Anyway, back up your data, because you never know when you are going to need that backup. u