Thread: Defrag fragged my drive

  1. #16
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    9,607
    Ok, ok, ok. I guess I might owe old Bill and apology here. Code some more last night and seems that I finally hit the bad sectors on the drive. Data read error's all over the place.
    Guess the drive did in fact die.

    But here is my problem. The old Scandisk utility used to scan the drive and produce somewhat helpful diagnostic information. The Windows XP Disk Management piece of poo does not. In fact when you have a problem is when Windows XP really shows some major oversights. Because they attempted to make the interface simpler, they really screwed those who actually understand what the heck is going on and how to fix it.

    It won't scan the surface of the drive.
    It won't fix bad sectors (it does, but requires a reboot because of dismounting the drive)
    It won't fix bad clusters (or file segments)
    It won't format a range of sectors.
    It won't attempt to move the corrupted data from one sector (segment) to another.

    These seem like glaring oversights. If I had known the drive did crash then I wouldn't have continued to use it. Why didn't format report that it could not format the whole drive?
    Why does it still show 73 GB avail when format only formatted about 4GB?
    It basically said that D: was not formatted when I tried to read my project file. Weird error.
    It seems that format only formatted the segments/sectors that were ok and left the others unformatted. Very strange.

  2. #17
    train spotter
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Location
    near a computer
    Posts
    3,868
    When I have seen issues like this the HD has been 'delaminating'. Sectors go bad randomly, one after the other. Once it starts things just rapidly get worse.

    Used to see it often with Win95A. Win95A would wear out the area it used as virtual memory when you had only 16Mb RAM.

    One other thing to consider is a RAM chip on the way out. Is OK 99% of the time, until stressed, and is corrupting your data.
    "Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter."
    Friedrich Nietzsche

    "I spent a lot of my money on booze, birds and fast cars......the rest I squandered."
    George Best

    "If you are going through hell....keep going."
    Winston Churchill

  3. #18
    UT2004 Addict Kleid-0's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2004
    Posts
    656
    Quote Originally Posted by ober
    I have another solution, and it's free! It's called Linux:
    http://iso.linuxquestions.org/

  4. #19

    Join Date
    May 2005
    Posts
    1,042
    Just wanted to say I'm sorry you are having such a difficult time, I hope you didn't lose too much in terms of precious programming files (I know just how catastrophic it can be losing stuff like that).
    I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.

  5. #20
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    9,607
    Well I lost everything because I didn't burn my recent stuff. But it's not all bad because some of the 'hacked in' portions of my code were really annoying me. Now I have a chance to fix those. I've also re-started the tile editor and it has a much better structure and is faster.

    Starting over is not all bad I reckon.

    I'm sure all of us have at one time or another looked at our code and thought......I really wish I could alter this design a bit after we have thought it through a bit. Well, now I have that chance w/o reworking all the code. The major problem with C++ is that if you change anything in a class be it a member variable name, function, algo, etc., it's ramifications reach much farther into your code than you ever expect. Before long it's not unreasonable to go from 0 errors to 100 errors. Even though we try to create re-usable code, sometimes it is good just to start over. Maybe this is why game companies often scrap a 3D engine to build a completely new one. It's like a book. It's never ever really finished, but what is there can always be polished up a bit.
    Last edited by VirtualAce; 11-20-2005 at 06:51 PM.

  6. #21
    i dont know Vicious's Avatar
    Join Date
    May 2002
    Posts
    1,200

    Thumbs up

    Way to make me scared to defrag my drive!

    Now it's like a gamble. Do I want my HD to wear out from reading all my fragments or do I want to risk loosing data and having to reformat. Now that I have wirtten it out, I can't really understand how a defrag could do that.

  7. #22
    Registered User VirtualAce's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    9,607
    Well Windows defrag sucks anyways. Look how it arranges the files when its all done. Half in front, half in the middle, and half in the last portion of the drive. The old defrag did it all in front. Perhaps this is because of NTFS or perhaps it's because defrag sucks. You choose.

    Defrag can hurt the drive because the stupid thing has to sit their and access ten million sectors,

    Basically:

    1. Read source data into buffer.
    2. Read dest data into buffer.
    3. Write dest data at source
    4. Write source data at dest.
    5. Wash, rinse, repeat about 10 billion times.

Popular pages Recent additions subscribe to a feed

Similar Threads

  1. SATA HDD failure
    By PING in forum Tech Board
    Replies: 4
    Last Post: 12-23-2008, 12:25 AM
  2. Detect SCSI Hard Drive Serial Number
    By mercury529 in forum Windows Programming
    Replies: 3
    Last Post: 10-17-2006, 06:23 PM
  3. Replies: 2
    Last Post: 07-06-2005, 07:11 PM
  4. Spin A Drive and such
    By Seph_31 in forum C Programming
    Replies: 15
    Last Post: 11-20-2003, 06:04 PM
  5. XP Shared Drive Problem(?)
    By Davros in forum Tech Board
    Replies: 2
    Last Post: 10-06-2002, 01:37 PM