Newsgroup: it.comp.hardware
Titolo: Newbie Problem: LBA/Bad Sectors/Non-BootUp

My problem is a little confusing for me since I have little computer
experience especially when it comes to hardware.
My father recently had me format his hard drive on his old 120 Mhz, 48 RAM,
US Robotics computer.  I was installing Windows 95 and when it begins to run
Scandisk to ensure that there are no errors on the hard drive, it gives me
this dialog window asking me if my "Logical Block Addressing is configured
correctly and that if it is or if I am not sure, that I should just proceed
with the scandisk."
It then tells me that my hd is clogged with too many bad sectors and thus
Scandisk cannot continue.  The surface scan is even worse, in that nearly
every sector except for the first few hundred sectors is a bad sector.
The thing is, the hard drive is fairly new, in that it is not more than 6
months old.  It is a Seagate 15 MB hard drive (but only 8MB of it is
recognizable in Win95).
So when I rebooted the computer and reformatted it again, I went into BIOS
setup and changed the HD configuration from Auto-detect to LBA because I
thought this might correct the problem.  Even worse, now the computer
refuses to boot up after the memory test.  It just lags and eventually
freezes after the test is over.  It will say "Keyboard Detected, Mouse
Detected..."  And freeze.  I have since hit DELETE to enter BIOS again, but
to no avail.  Skipping the memory test to get into BIOS just freezes as
well.
I'm extremely frustrated and I have no way of resolving this offline.  I
have read up on Seagate's troubleshooting hard drive, but they do not seem
to have any answer that has helped me yet (perhaps I'm really that computer
dumb) and no answers have been provided browsing through old newsgroup
posts.
Would anyone be so kind as to help address what problem I have and how I can
fix it?
Thanks,
Justin

experience especially when it comes to hardware.
You have a world of hurt there, my friend.  (Is this really a US
Robotics computer?  Dang, I never heard of that before)  You may be
best off finding yourself a Promise Ultra-66 card ($15 if you look
around a little), assuming you have a free PCI slot to plug it into.
The Promise BIOS will take care of the large drive size and the
addressing situation.  The drive will work faster in the PC too, since
your old bugger probably doesn't support anything later than PIO mode.
Install the card and then disable the onboard IDE controller in the
BIOS and you should be good to go.
You might also want to look around for someone who has an unused Win98
(or at least Win95b aka OSR2) disk that has FAT32 support so you won't
need all those small partitions.
SteveR
s.r.r.2 a.t w.i.n.s.o.c.k.e.t d.o.t c.o.m 

 need all those small partitions.
I'll look aroudn for that Ultra 66 card.  It sounds extremely useful and
something I should definitely have.  I've got a Win98 CD around here, I'll
see what I can do with it.  =)
Justin

into BIOS instead of freezing up all the time.
It sounds like the system is getting very confused by this disk.  If
you disconnect it, does the system let you into bios setup and then to
boot from a floppy?
In theory, you should be able to disable the on-board IDE controller
and treat the Promise card as the only controller.  The system will
boot normally from it.
My approach would be to remove the disk and get to bios setup.  Then
choose "setup defaults" which should reset everything to its default
settings, and then disable the on-board IDE controller.  Then install
the Promise card with the disk on it and, hopefully, boot from the
Win9x CD, whereupon Windows setup should find the disk and offer to
partition and format it for you.  During install the Promise card will
run in compatibility mode, but eventually you'll have to install the
driver that comes on the floppy with the card to get the full
potential of the card.  IIRC, Promise has some fairly detailed setup
instructions on its web site for new installs.  It should be fairly
straightforward.
