Scandisk and DOS

[Keith]

I have a very sick laptop. It's so bad that Windows 89
wont load.

There are lots of bad sectors being reported by scandisk.
So far I am at 30% and it's taken me almost three weeks to
get this far. Everytime scandisk encounters an error it
stops and askes if I want to repair it.

Is there a way in DOS to get scandisk to autofix so it can
be left unatended?

[AlmostBob]

scandisk c: /autofix /noprompt /nosave /surface

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"Keith" > wrote in message
...
| I have a very sick laptop. It's so bad that Windows 89
| wont load.
|
| There are lots of bad sectors being reported by scandisk.
| So far I am at 30% and it's taken me almost three weeks to
| get this far. Everytime scandisk encounters an error it
| stops and askes if I want to repair it.
|
| Is there a way in DOS to get scandisk to autofix so it can
| be left unatended?

[Ron Martell]

"Keith" > wrote:

>I have a very sick laptop. It's so bad that Windows 89
>wont load.
>
>There are lots of bad sectors being reported by scandisk.
>So far I am at 30% and it's taken me almost three weeks to
>get this far. Everytime scandisk encounters an error it
>stops and askes if I want to repair it.
>
>Is there a way in DOS to get scandisk to autofix so it can
>be left unatended?

A hard drive with that many bad sectors is usually one that is about
to join the "dearly departed".

If you really want to repair the drive and recover the useful content
from these bad sectors then you should be using Spinrite from Gibson
Research (www.grc.com) rather than Scandisk. Scandisk cannot recover
content and clusters marked bad by Scandisk usually complicate the
repair and recovery of the data by Spinrite.

Spinrite can be very slow - I can recall it taking 76 hours to process
a 4 gb drive - but it does work. With that 4 gb drive I was able to
recover all of the customer's critical data. The drive became
dumpster food shortly thereafter.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."