18 Jul
2014
18 Jul
'14
8:51 p.m.
On Fri, 18 Jul 2014, David Gesswein wrote:
I'm looking for a program that runs under DOS
3.1 and will tell me CHS for
all unreadable hard disk sectors. Anybody know where one is I can download?
I can't find search keywords that filters out the modern stuff. A read
write test would also be useful.
Depends on the type of drive.
Are you talking about "MFM" (ST506/412), or are you talking about
SATA/PATA/USB, multi-gig, multi-terabytes, etc?
PC-DOS/MS-DOS 3.10 (three point ten) had a limit of 32M for a regular hard
disk.
BUT, it was the first version with the network redirector, and it was
possible (albeit hassle) to access larger drives through MSCDEX or
equivalent. DOS 3.31 was the first one to support hard drives larger than
32M.
Back in those days, the usual programs for testing hard drives, and
finding bad tracks were SpeedStor and SpinRite. DO NOT use old versions
of SpinRite with a [default] setting of "return to service anything that
tests good" - if the manufacturer of the drive says that a given track
can't be trusted, then I don't think that a single successful test by the
program over-rides that!
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com