Amazing uptime...

During Windoze 3.10 installation, SMARTDRV was installed. NO, you did not get a choice, nor configuration options, and it was set for write cacheing. "Sector not found during write\nRetry?" (during one of the last couple of files) Normally, it could be easily handled by "Ignore", noting which file write had failed, renaming that file SECTORS.BAD and then manually installing THAT file. But, Because wrtite caching was enabled, SMARTDRV had long ago told the installer that the write had been done. SUCCESSFULLY Therefore, "Ignore" was not an option. "Abort" was not an option. "Fail" was not an option. Control could be regained by power cycling the machine. But, because the mode of write caching included re-arranged writes, the DIRectory entries had not been written. Power cycling brought you all the way back to before INSTALL. SSTOR and SPINRITE could not find the drive fault! But, it happened consistently, and at the same point. Solution was to copy some dummy files to the disk, so that the fault would occur at a different part of the INSTALL. I encountered it during BETA of 3.10. I contacted Beta Support. They said, "well, it's a hardware problem; we don't care about it." I pointed out to them that a "hardware problem" during delayed writes was a MAJOR disaster, and that we rely on the OS to enable us to recover or work around them. "We absolutely need to have a way to disable delayed writes." "Hardware fault; not our problem." They dropped me from subsequent Beta programs, probably due to my bad attitude (MS "Beta" wanted CHEERLEADERS, NOT faultfinders! For MY Beta testing, I hired a guy who could break a crowbar in a sandbox) Not much later, MS had to replace all of 6.00 with 6.2x due ENTIRELY to SMARTDRV delayed writes. (NO, it was NEVER a problem with "compression". EVERY error being blamed on "compression" was delayed writes." (cf. Swaine(Infoworld)/Gates flames)) -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com