Hard-drive diagnostic program

On Wed, 5 Sep 2012, Tothwolf wrote: Your spinning rust will fail! [Am I the first? USA dollars or facebook shares?] Oh. You want to know WHEN? Prob'ly in less than 40 years. plus or minus 40. Statistically, drives tested with Spinrite fail sooner than those that never get tested at all. (likewise, people in hospital critical care wards are more likely to die than the general population of people at home.) How many people remember when Spinrite BY DEFAULT would take any KNOWN BAD tracks, and return them to use if they happened to pass the Spinrite tests? (Spinrite testing is substantiqally less thorough than the analog testing that manufacturers do.] It consistently could not find fault with the track that Windoze 3.10 setup consistently died on. Thanks to DUMBDRV's delayed writes, there were no choices of Abort, Fail, or Ignore, and Windoze did not give a choice about it installing the cacheing software and misconfiguring it. I told MICROS~1 that they had a problem; they said "hardware problem, not interested"; they had to do a free replacement of MS-DOS 6.00 with 6.20 (to configure the cacheing in a less suicidally agressive setup) They will last longer in a cool dry environment with no magnets and no popcorn. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com