HDTest question
4 messages in this thread
Don -I have a one-partition hard drive, named "WorkBench", and had been
getting "Volume WorkBench has a Read/Write Error" system messages for a
while, occasionally, averaging less than once a day. When I click it off,
the system happily proceeds to run whatever I had asked it to do, usually,
without error (that I can detect). Rarely, it gurus. The next time I issue
that same command I get no system messages, and it runs fine. I am not
certain, but I think this started after B.A.D.-ing the drive.
Anyway, I hadn't Quarterbacked it up in a while, so I decided to do
that, then try your HDTest on it. Quarterbacked last night. Now, I have
an A2000 with MicroBotics HardFrame 2000 and mounted Quantum 40s that I
bought used, and have little documentation for. What MicroBotics RDPrep
program returns in "default" information (editted to fit here better) is:
Developer's Rigid Disk Prep 1.3 Copyright 1988 MicroBotics, Inc
HardFrame.device Release 1.5
SCSI Units available, <board><LUN><SCSIID>: 001
block 27, Name "DH0"
TableSize : 16 SizeBlock : 128
SecOrg : 0 Surfaces : 1
SectorPerBlock : 1 BlocksPerTrack : 98
Reserved : 2 PreAlloc : 0
Interleave : 0
LowCyl : 1 HighCyl : 833
NumBuffers : 4 BufMemType : 5
MaxTransfer : 131072 Mask : 0x00fffffe
BootPri : 0 DosType : "DOS^A"
So I ran: 1 > HDTest HardFrame.device 001 833 1 98 And I got:
Working…please wait (^C to Abort)
81634 sectors read, 0 errors found
[ MORE ]
If you haven't read all the documentation that came with B.A.D. (not just
the printed stuff, there's some stuff on the disk), do so! I found out
that B.A.D. will do some pretty nasty stuff to your HD if you don't have
enough free CONTIGUOUS RAM when you run B.A.D. By contiguous, I mean RAM
that is sitting there in one HUGE chunk. To optimize anything over about
35MB, you need over 512K free of contiguous RAM.
B.A.D. may not make any physical (hard) read errors on your HD, but will
produce system level (soft) read errors if it doesn't have enough RAM to
work with. Stupid thing is, it doesn't tell you if have enough RAM before
you try to optimize a section of your HD.
My suggestion is to back up your drive, partition it into two 20MB
sections, and re-format it. Then, when running B.A.D., always open a
CLI/Shell and check your free memory with AVAIL. Their formula for
computing the amount of RAM needed to optimize a drive is 24K/MB. In other
words, if you want to optimize a 10MB partition, you need 240K of free,
contiguous RAM.
Hope this helps… If it doesn't, let me know what doesn't make sense. Ted
The average Hard drive partition consumes 50K of RAM with system overhead,
something you'll have to live with in the day-to-day use of the system,
whether or not you are using BAD. Partitioning usually isn't a very good
suggestion if you are trying to help someone in a limited-RAM situation.
I know… That's the Catch-22 of it all. Either backup, format, and
restore, or partition and B.A.D. Hopefully CCS's QuarterbackTools will
resolve this problem. They're supposed to work on partitions up to 500MB!
I'm looking forward to seeing this product work!
Ted