OK, I've been using XP for a while now, but now I've a problem...
I was having some random crashes (no blue screen, just system halts) earlier and decided, well, my system was in such chaos that it probably warranted starting from scratch (boot system on slowest hard drive of three, fastest hard drive paired with CD-ROM, etc.)... Before I did this, I told Windows to do a surface scan on each drive, which came up clean.
Now, I've re-arranged the drives as I desired and am currently installed on a small 10-gig partition on my fastest drive. I was about to partition up the other drives when the format halted.... rebooted, tried again, and the format halted again at the same spot. Basically, I need something that can map out bad sectors on a drive and record it to the drive's BIOS (old hardware did this all the time) and I'm going to cross my fingers and hope this isn't a malignant problem (not going to spread).
So, if Windows Format halts the system, what other options are there?
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CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Mobo: Biostar N4SLI-A9 RAM: 2G Crucial (DDR400) Video: eVGA GeForce 7900 GTX (512M) Audio: HDA X-Mystique HD(s): Maxtor 300G SATA2, Samsung 400G SATA2 OS(s): WinXP x64 Pro, Vista x32 Ultimate, Gentoo x64 Monitor(s): Primary - 19" Flat Panel (1280x1024) Secondary - 19" Flat Panel (1280x1024) Tertiary - Zenith 42" Plasma TV (1024x768 res)
Many other machines... sig too short