Hard Drive Gone Mad

[Cheesus]

A while back I started had a problem with my games getting moved to found.00*. At first I thaught it was problem with disk cahing being enabled, but its still happening now, even tho its disabled. Having to keep moving my files every 2 days is really starting to piss me off. Now I think its solely my hard drive dying. Is there anything I can do to stop this short of buying a new hard drive?

[refraction]

back up all your files, do a low level format on the drive, then reinstall.

thats probably the closest thing to a solution youll get.

[Hard core Rikki]

Originally Posted by refraction

back up all your files, do a low level format on the drive, then reinstall.
thats probably the closest thing to a solution youll get.

Plus a checkdisk with error correction plus sector content recovery, either before or after format. That check should be done once in a while, even

[S.SubZero]

Originally Posted by refraction

back up all your files, do a low level format on the drive, then reinstall.

Disk formatting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Today, an end-user, in most cases, should never perform a low-level formatting of an IDE or ATA hard drive, and in fact it is often not possible to do so on modern hard drives outside of the factory.

While it's impossible to perform an LLF on most modern hard drives (since the mid-1990s) outside the factory, the term "low-level format" is still being used (erroneously) for what should be called the reinitialization of an IDE or ATA hard drive to its factory configuration

Those found.000 files are when chkdsk has ran into a problem and it has to do that to salvage the data. On a modern hard drive this should pretty much never happen. Depending on the drive, you may be able to qualify to get it replaced under warranty (if applicable to your drive's age).

[refraction]

i would like to oppose that article, since ive low level formatted 3-4 hard drives since 2000!

usually a tool is available from the hard disc manufacturer n they refer to it as "zero drive" which is essentially the same thing. If not you can get a utility called Killdisk to do it, there is a windows version, which would obviously mean putting the drive in another pc, but i dont know about a dos version.

i had to do it on one of my old seagates. bought it in like 2003, after about a month it started getting errors quite badly, then i did a low level format, never had a problem after that!

[Cheesus]

Yeah its a crappy ide hard drive that I salvaged from an old computer from my dad's work. Iv been using it for about 3 years, and who knows how long the guy before me used it. Its to be expected from something this old.

Right now I'm defragmenting (Disk Keeper), and as soon as this finishes I'm gonna run a sheduled chckdsk. I can't do a low level format because its IDE (dammit...).

I have a feeling I have no choice but to buy a new one. Does it make any significant diffirence if its SATA or SATAII

[refraction]

Originally Posted by Cheesus

Right now I'm defragmenting (Disk Keeper), and as soon as this finishes I'm gonna run a sheduled chckdsk. I can't do a low level format because its IDE (dammit...).

why would that be a problem? every drive ive low level formatted was IDE

[Cheesus]

I googled low level ide format (or sumtin like that), and the first few links said that it would be useless and slow it down. Not sure how reliable they are, but according to them i could actually damage the drive.

So you think I should do a low level format anyways? Im game, Iv got nothing to lose.