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Thread ID: 9 1998-09-01 00:23:00 Damaged hard drive Guest (0) Press F1
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110 1998-09-01 00:23:00 I bought a computer while on holiday in Australia, a Pentium-100 with 32MB of Ram, 1.08GB Western Digital Hard Drive, 4X CD-Rom drive and a Vibra16 sound card, running Windows 95. After returning to Fiji I decided to get my PC up and running.

For the first few weeks it ran fine, but after some time a problem came up. Upon the first boot, the system would recognise the hard disk but failed to boot from it. A message would appear where the message 'Starting Windows 95' appears saying 'Drive not ready, insert boot disk'. At first I thought the OS had given up but after resetting the system it would then boot to Windows 95. I tried everything to fix this problem but to no avail. After a few months I got an error message saying something about 'Swap file corrupted.' I then ran Norton Disk Doctor and after running a surface scan I discovered that the hard drive had become physically damaged. The summary showed that 558MB was physically damaged. Sometime later when booting my PC I got the message: 'Sector not found reading drive C.' I then had to reformat my C: drive. I could not format it fully.
After running Fdisk and setting the primary partition to the maximum size, I then tried to format the C: drive. At 85% or so the format would stop and a message appeared saying format terminated. I then had to run Fdisk again and lower the size of the primary partition. I had to lower it three times until I could fully format the C: drive to only 815MB. After this I loaded everything back onto it.

More problems followed: Windows 95 would not start. The startup screen would show and then the message ' Its now safe to turn off your computer' would appear. I then booted from the Windows 95 emergency disk and ran ScanDisk. ScanDisk would stop at the scan of the FAT and a message would appear saying 'ScanDisk cannot fix drive C'. I then had to try and format my C: drive again but it would not format. A message appeared saying 'Invalid media or track O bad.' I got a smaller hard drive and loaded the OS on to it, making it the primary master and the larger hard drive the secondary master since my CD-Rom is the primary slave. When I ran Windows Explorer I was amazed to see that the D: drive, which was the Western Digital hard drive, had appeared. I formatted it and it was fine except that it did not format up to 1.08GB. The next day when I switched on my computer, a weird noise came from the Western Digital hard disk; it kept making a scratching sound and was spinning like crazy. Windows 95 did not recognise it any more. This problem has left me stranded with a 125MB hard disk running only Windows 95, Word and Excel95.
Guest (0)
111 2004-12-20 21:24:00 A 1.08 GIG HARD DRIVE?! :eek: Who needs a GIG?!?!?! Somebody has TOO MUCH money to spend! Zygar (29)
112 2004-12-20 22:18:00 And the point of dredging this 6 year old post up is??? pheonix (36)
113 2004-12-20 22:22:00 *smacks head on desk*

NOT FUNNY!
Edward (31)
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