Lost Clusters and Beyond!

gjohnson · #1 February 13th, 2005, 09:34 AM

Everytime I run Scandisk, it reports that it has detected "lost clusters"...I can only run Scandisk in the MS-DOS mode, since in Windows 98SE, it just starts and restarts...something seems to be running in the background, but the only diagnostic program I have is Norton SystemsWorks and it still does it even when I disable it...

By the way, this problems does not occur in my D & E drives, only C.

Since I have had this problems, I can't defrag my C drive and do any sort of hard drive clean-up...It seems that this lost cluster error (?) occurs about half-way into the scan and then the scan just stops until it restarts over and over again...

Any ideas?

Thanks!

oink · #2 February 13th, 2005, 08:48 PM

I would quickly buy another hard drive of same or larger size and mirror the drive. After that I would worry about trying to save the old drive. It is very likely failing.

gjohnson · #3 February 15th, 2005, 08:22 AM

I have a 80 GB drive (Called drive "D" on my computer) that was recently installed as a "slave" and has little info on it...how do I transfer or mirror all of the information on the "C" (7.43 GB) drive (which also has a portion partitioned as a "E" system save (1.85 GB)?...I guess I could use the old C drive for some storage of files...

Thanks for your help...

oink · #4 February 15th, 2005, 09:03 PM

You can use the utility disk that most likely came with the 80gig drive. If you don't have it go to the drive manufacturers website and download it. If just using this free tool, you will need to relocate all info on the 80gig and repartition it. I don't know about your system save but if you wish to continue with it you will need to partition the drive into at least two partitions. You can make more partitions but the boot drive will have to be at least the size of the current C: partition. For a standard setup (there are fancier, and likely better arrangements) you could partition 20gigs for the mirror, 58gigs for new programs etc. and the remainder for the E

system save). You install the drive, partition it make the boot drive active, and then find the mirror utility on the utility disk and mirror it. It is fairly simple. It will take a fair time for the mirror to complete. You will have to mirror the system save seperately. You then remove the original drive and adjust jumpers if needed. See if it boots correctly and if averything copied corectly. If everything worked correctly you can then try to salvage the failing drive. Don't delay as they often fail quickly once they have started.