Years ago, I used a product called Spinrite made by Gibson Research. That software resurrected bad sectors on my Seagate st251 hard drive and I used that hard drive for many more years after Spinrite fixed it. I think the exact software name was Spinrite II. Hth.
Spinrite is still available and his website still sells it. Spinrite has the ability to "talk" directly to the drive. It's basically a software version of the BIOS but has more tools.
Yes the early Spinrite was able to actually low level format a drive back in the MFM/RLL days. This was because before the introduction of IDE (integrated drive electronics), it was the computer controller card that actually told the drive motors what to do. So with Spinrite you could reformat everything, change the interleave and do a remapping of the internal bad sector table, even change the drive from MFM to RLL (assuming your disk controller had firmware chip updated for RLL) gaining 50% more space. With IDE (integrated drive electronics) actually controlling the drive was offloaded to the PCB on the drive and the computer just gave a command on what it wanted the drive to do (say read the sector located at cylinder 4, head 9, sector 7). It made life much simpler, but also took away that low level ability as there is no IDE/ATA command that actually reformats the drives. So the best you can do is zero out the drive (which does not zero out the track/sector markers) and high level format from scratch.
A lot of my IDE drives have died over time but a few are still working. They are also very heavy for storing and these are the reasons I like to use flash based storage 😊
@@Roadkill7878 cant you just connect both flash storage with the broken hdd and only redirect the ide commands to the broken hdd without relying on the response so we have noises while using the flash storage for retrieving the data?
Three things that might help: 1: Google 98 Lite. It might squash a 98 install small enough. Unfortunately Windows 98 isn't Windows 95. 2: Spinrite. You'll be sent to Gibson Research. He's a guy who's been doing things like this for a long time. He even has a test program for Zip drives for the "click of death". Spinrite can sometimes "exercise" and fix bad sectors pretty reliably. 3: Drivespace/Doublespace that's built into DOS 6.xx. The "Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95" had the latest version of Drivespace 3 that had even better drive compression.
Spinrite has been great for me. But though it can 'fix' bad sectors, you'd be best off to take the 'fixed' drive out of service asap afetr getting your data from it. It can also scan pretty much any storage device it can see, floppies, zips, SD cards even ipods. I just with Steve would hurry up and finish the new version which uses a much better way to access the drives so recovering a 500Gb drive will no longer take 24+ hours.
About 30 years ago I started trying to save those dying HDDs using stuff like low level format, repartitioning, chkdsk, Scandisk, Partition Magic 4, WD and Seagate tools and some more. It never worked out, the bad sectors almost became more and more in short times. All in all roundabout 100 drives I tried to fix over the years (mostly by customer wishes). IMO there are mainly 3 reasons for bad sectors: Bad platter plating (e.g. Conner, Maxtor). Particles, emitted by the dust filter hitting the platter surface and moving around. Headcrash (quick death) The first/most dying HDD brands in order and my experience: Conner Maxtor Seagate IBM Fujitsu Toshiba ... WD
When I was young, I had lots of free time but no money at all. So I have done all of these things: drilling/cutting holes in diskettes/floppy drives to make them double sided, reformatting to get more capacity, using arj compress content, used Doublespace/Drivespace for more diskspace, tools like Quarterdeck QEMM for more memory, overclocking without knowing what I was doing... I learned so many things that are now absolutely obsolete and none of my younger coworkers have any idea what I'm talking about. I installed both Windows 95 AND Office 95 from floppy disk, which was a very time consuming excercise. All of this combined with questionable hardware (dumpster dive acquired VLB cards, buggy chipsets, leaky capacitors, shoddy power supplies, dying harddisks), but it still brings a smile on my face when someone else is going through the same paces on youtube, well done sir!
Oh Gods, DriveSpace, that name brings back memories. It used to take days to compress a drive just for a few extra megabytes so I can have Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit installed at the same time. That was a fun time.
Have a look at HDAT2. A free and powerful DOS software that I use daily on my job to test and refurbish HDDs and SSDs. The drive is small. Wipe it 10 or 20 times and then run a read write read test. It might reduce or remove all bad sectors. With newer disks, the controller will reallocate those sectors and replace them with spares. Unfortunately, there's no such thing in such an old drive, as far as I know
A modern-ish tool i like to use to repair bad sectors (even on drives as new as 2000 in my experience) is called victoria disk utility. There are special modes within the program that can force write to bad sectors, or do long write cycles to magnetize bad sectors. It needs windows XP or later, but if you have a system that runs XP and has a proper IDE controller, it is very handy. This tool can run on modern versions of windows as well, but it is mostly designed for XP.
I have exactly this hard drive. Got it in 1992 when I was 4 years old and it was still in use in 1997 in a secondary PC for DOS gaming since many games didn't like Windows 95. Then it was still in use as a secondary hard drive in a Windows 98 PC (along with a 1 GB one - it made no sense but why not). In the 1st of May 2000 the motherboard of that PC got fried and I put that hard disk away. It's still somewhere in the attic but it might no longer turn on as it's sleeping since 23 years now, most probably some components or the disk itself has been damaged during the years.
I actually had to salvage data and recover an old HDD from a very important official's system many years ago. The drive was a 40GB if I recall correctly. After salvaging all the data I could, I ran low level scans a few times. But this computer was so mission critical, i didn't take any chances. I read over where all the bad blocks were found, then I literally brute forced it with a hex disk editor and marked the *entire* regions as bad blocks, rather than count on disk scanning software to tell me there's a few 'good' sectors in these otherwise obvious bad regions. After I reformatted it and reinstalled the OS, with my custom written bad sectors, everything worked perfectly! In this case, reliability was *way* more important than available space. I think it only knocked out like 2MB of a 40GB drive, but yeah I didn't want this official coming back within a month or three because a random sector went bad in a known bad region, so I just brute force wrote the entire larger sections as bad. No its not easy to do that way, but when it comes to a mission critical system (and an organization not in any hurry to replace damaged parts), I didn't want to be held liable for any future failures.
There were some configurable win95 versions released to oem's for their own customization. Some copies are available online if you poke around enough. You select the components you want and leave the ones you don't out. A lot like the embedded versions ms used to release for hw manufacturers. You can definitely get the install down to 15-20mb depending on what features you want.
I'd definitely check into spinrite. Steve Gibson used to be the "master" with that fine software back in those days for sure. Yes, it's sometimes slow, however, slow and steady wins the race, as "they" say, lol.
I think I tried something called "stacker" back in the days as my HDD was indeed a 40MB HDD and I could barely have Windows (3.11) and a few programs there before it was full. I remember when we ran the program and showed double capacity! Wow! Still, when actual data was stored, the final actual capacity was more or less the same. I remember watching a video about these programs, one turned out to be just a GUI, no actual compression. It was pure, 100% marketing :D
That sounds like RamDoubler or so - it was just having a few fancy gauges to show you your free memory, but it didn't actually do anything, let alone double your memory.
Stacker was a legitimate disk compression tool. Microsoft tried to license it but didn't want to pay enough and integrated a different product for DoubleSpace. Stac won a lawsuit against MS resulting in MS-DOS 6.21 with compression removed and then 6.22 with DriveSpace, which used a different, non-infringing algorithm.
I was always using NDD (Norton Disk Doctor) to test HDD and floppy surface and mark bad sectors. It was way better than scandisk. It could, however, destroy/damage the data on the drive if you allow it to fix "logical" problems, like, say, "disk structure". So be careful.
I've had an idea in my mind for a while now. It's a simple idea, but difficult To Implement. The idea is to get the sound of an old HDD while using a modern SD to IDE. If someone could make a device that can use old spinning HDDs that no longer work, but still spin and have a working head arm. If we could use the LED of an SD to IDE that is connected to a spinning HDD and have the LED flashes to make the HDD move the drive arm. I think it could save many old HDDs from the dump and would bring back the sound and feeling of old PCs. I know a speaker device this available, but nothing can replace sound of a real spinning drive.
Personally I would recommend MHDD or Victoria, of course DOS versions. These programs can test whole surface of the drive, try to relocate bad sectors or fix them if it's possible. Very useful tools and if I remember well they are available on Hirens Boot 15.2 package ;)
I would agree. You could probably use Victoria to forcibly perform a write action with random data on the offending LBA’s several times to see if they come good before trying to do a read/write test on it.
does those caviar hdd's still have little socket in one of those 2 cutouts in the casting on the oposite side than ide connector? if yes you can install led in it and hdd would have bussy light separate to one on the motherboard, older hdd's had a led soldered on them, newer were equiped with sockets and later this feature was droped, but you could have rgb hdd in the early 90's
I've used disk compression - these were desperate times, HDDs were super small - but it was SO SO SLOW, especially on the miserable CPU I must have had back then, that it was basically unusable.
This seems a good place to ask: I have a dvd-RW with family videos on it, which has been formatted almost 15 years ago; when I try to insert it in my disk reader, it spins up, clicks a little, and spins down. For other disks of the same type, everything works fine (I was able to get everything on them, with some minor details or scene losses). Any idea on what might be happening? My theory is that the disk reader is unable to find the beginning of the track, or something like that. The idea was to take an entire image/copy of the disk (2G), and use some other tool like photorec to analyze the data (basically all VOB files, and some images), but being unable to read it in the first place stumped me, and online searches didnireally help. Anyway, very interesting video, will keep an eye on this.
Did you try an unconditional format of the drive using the /U option? I use that sometimes with old floppy disks and do a second "normal" format afterwards to make sure the bad sectors have not returned and were only caused by drive head alignment issues and not actual physical damage of the disk. Don't know if the same can/does apply to a harddisk. Perhaps you can try?
I did not try anything on this drive yet apart from the regular format. I reached out to Steve Gibson (Gibson Research Corporation) for SpinRite. I exchanged a few mails with him and I am set to let SpinRite 3.1 do some magic! This will be an exciting project, but I don't want to say too much yet!
My first attempt to install Win 95 was on a 40MB drive. Back then I didn't know upfront that you couldn't compress the content on the drive to gain space (According to the Win95 installer) - I tried everything I could at the time in order to get 95 running on my system, but I had no luck until I bought a new drive - a 4.3GB Maxtor. ----- I love the sound of old drives and still want to use them for nostalgia in some systems, but I've also picked up a lot of 2.5" SATA platter drives for retro use due to the reliability issues of older drive models. It's too bad they're so quiet, but with a computer on top of a desk and a drive mounted upfront, you can at least still get some semblence of days past, and better accuracy then something like the HDD Clicker. SSDs work fine for some situations too, but it's not something I trust for data integrity, if a machine may be powered off for a few years. Alternatively, SLC drives or CF cards are pretty trustworthy. A 500GB platter drive shortstroked to a smaller size performs extremely well on older systems. Then there's the SSD-cached HDDs that have 8GB of SSD cache, to keep them fast, but backed by magnetic storage for offline data integrity. $5/for a "SSHD" drive is a pretty great deal. "Limitations" - beyond my original 486 system, I always bought large drives that I could never fill (had the 4.3GB drive in my late model 486DX4), and usually more RAM than I ever needed too (kept disk i/o and swap bottlenecks to a minimum). I've never been one to like a sluggish system, and back in the mid to late 90's, those were usually the bottlenecks for anything besides game framerates. As one can imagine, computers stalling out in performance improvements, and software having become extremely bloated for over a decade now, computers and software today have gotten aggrevating to use. But I still like to hear the mechanical clicking today. Fan noise not so much (late 90's watercooling to the rescue), and I was happy to get rid of HDD noise in my main system at some point where SSDs got large enough for OS AND data, but for my retro systems, and servers where the i/o limitations don't waste my time, I still enjoy hearing my activity provide acoustic feedback.
10 years ago, WD SSHDs tended to have their flash overheat(?) and fail. One of my laptop drives from that time reported an unrecoverable sector failure or something, and I no longer trust it with any data (currently don't have a use for it).
I could be mistaken, but I think a lot of newer drives have their accoustics setting to quiet by default... You might squeeze some more noise (and performance?) out of those quieter drives if you can change those settings in the BIOS, and/or find some [linux?] utility to change their defaults... Maybe something SMART-related or 'hdparm' comes to mind (with little knowledge off-hand).
Yes. Used all those tools, and I miss detailed scandisk. I have fiddled with partition tables at interrupt level to hide/unhide things. Patched interrupt 19 to give someone a can't do that message using ctrl-alt-delete. 😅 Interrupt 13 for direct access to disks was common. I still have a PC setup with multiple plug in drive cradles and can even handle, god forbid, zip drives. I regularly retrive old stuff from even 720k floppies and external apple drives, rescuing data, which apple mostly destroys any way.🎉😂
Formatting from the command line doesn't actually zero out the sectors as I understood it, rather it does a quick format and tests each sector for readability.
I use three disk utilities for intensive work: Gibson Research's SpinRite 6 (it's about $80 online, boots from DOS, best for old drives on computers made before Intel's i-series CPUs (Core2 or earlier)); Crystal Disk Info (donation-ware, runs in Windows 7/10/11, better for newer drives on newer computers including NVMe), and HDAT2 on the Ultimate Boot CD 5.11 (free downloadable ISO, boots in DOS, works best on Core2 or earlier). SpinRite is my go-to, especially when data recovery is important. The others are also good for disk wiping, viewing in-depth SMART statistics, and setting disk parameters such as acoustic mode and idle timeouts. For Macs, the best Classic options are LaCie's SilverLining or FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit; on modern Macs I just pull the disk and run the diagnostics in a PC.
Рік тому
I didn't use drivespace but I have memories of installing Windows95 from floppies in my primary schools "IT" classroom. We packaged the install files with winzip and extracted them from floppies onto the harddrives and started the installs from there.
i messed around with micro95 years ago, it's basically like 98lite, it's just a set of inf's for win95a's installer that makes it so small you could fit win95 into a 4mb ramdisk. of course it's also barely functional, but you have explorer and notepad and a few other things. you can add back needed runtime dll's by extracting whatever you need from the cab's off the install disks.
Did you try a low level format? We use to throw that around like spaghetti in the 90's, it was something released before seatools, also by Seagate, it was a dedicated low level format utility.
No, I have not yet used any other formatting tools than the ones seen in the video. I read that low level formatting may cause issues in certain cases. I didn't want to jeopardize the upcoming videos and went with a simple DOS format. It seems to be good enough for me to continue for now, but I'll definitely try different things later!
My first IBM PS2 486 came with drive space already enabled. I didn't even know it was at the time, as I'm sure most consumers didn't. It was only a 200MB native HDD I think. I feel like they stopped shipping systems like that by default around Windows 95 as it probably generated too many complaints.
Try with HDD Regenerator. It's more of a tool to recover data than to actually "repair" a drive, as it is not unusual for the bad sectors to "reappear" (and for new bad sectors to appear on an already unreliable drive, of course), but for old and test drives where data loss is not a concern it's a great tool.
Doublespace or Drivespace? Never used those. Back in the DOS 5.0 days, I used similar software called Stacker. I don't remember having any corruption issues, but it was pretty slow reading or writing to the drive.
Yeah, I heard of Stacker. DoubleSpace was introduced with MS-DOS 6, if I'm not mistaken. It was a response to DR-DOS having Disk compression for several months prior.
I used Stacker before the DblSpace/DriveSpace days. Oh and today I often scan HDDs and SSDs with HDD Regenerator which is advertised with its supposed ability to recover bad sectors as in making them usable again - but I haven't ever tried this function and I don't even know if it's there in the freeware version, maybe with limitations...?
5:50 when i was a kid, i saw my cousin sometimes using pcs with that screen, i always though it was some kind of game, like you make a law and see how many ppl in the parlament would approve or something, so i always watched that with pleasure while my cousin was either bored enough to leave the room, or angry.
I often use Dban to format drives with sector problems as it wipes all data including partitions, locked sectors etc. or I more often use WD Data Life Guard to write zeroes to the drive which also can rejuvenate or remap sectors if the drive supports it. typically if the drive is too old to have spare sectors it can remap to it is harder to get reliable. but if the drive has sectors that are bad because it was interrupted or otherwise corrupted for other reasons than actual physical damage then Dban and WDDLG might actually fix it. I done this a lot to fix drives. I am sure your WD Drives have Smart capability for remapping sectors and you could use software to check if they have done so, it is pretty common your older drives already have damaged sectors it have remapped but then it won´t show up in scandisk as it just uses a spare sector for it instead. it is when Scandisk show bad sectors you are in more trouble as it might either A: have no spare sectors, or B not yet remapped it, C: sector is too broken to remap, or D: the drive have run out of spare sectors. or some other reasons. you could also have a phenomenon called sector rot, or disk rot, when the drive been sitting for so long the magnetic flux have faded away and it can no longer make a self test or read write correctly, if it have not gone too long it might also work after you write zeroes to all sectors again to renew the magnetic field
I've managed to fix weak / bad sectors on a Samsung drive, obviously not that old a 2TB from 15 years ago. What tool did I use... none, I made my own bash shell script in Linux to read block by block and write down all the sectors that were unreadable, I had to do this myself because every time the drive tried to read a bad sector the drive itself would crash and give out IO error on the SATA bus, sometimes it would kernel panic the OS. I top note, if your drive kernel panics the OS, connect it via a sata to usb adaptor it at least wont crash your chipset and only crash the adaptor instead. Next I read all those bad / weak sectors into another script and either got DD to inverse the value of the read sector (I chose to read 10 times to get the data) and write it back to disk, then write the original data back, or if the sector was 100% broken try to write a 0 then a 1. I then made script run the entire process about 500 times. Now the drive thinks there is nothing wrong and smart says the drive is 100% fine and read and writing to the drive does not crash my OS. I was also able to retrieve all the data back from the drive, the bad sectors didn't actually have any real data on them which is kinda lucky, bu the weak sectors did (the ones i had to read 5 - 10 times for it to get the data). No idea why that worked, or why I thought to even try doing that, or why it fixed it but 🙃. As for drive compression, that is still a thing. BTRFS filesystem on Linux has built in compression at kernel level so you can use a variety of compression techniques, including my favourite zstd, a really fast and good compression technique made by Facebook of all companies. Not only to you use less space but the data reads faster, it's even fast enough to be usable on SSDs at the lower compression levels. It also intelligently works out if something is compressible, so not everything is compressed if there is no benefit.
There were times when I was using 100mb hard drive with drivespace. No errors, no data loss. Also used it for ramdisk (as I had 32mb of ram and could give 24 to ramdisk and install/copy a game like DukeNukem3D on it.)
The sound of the hard drive spinning reminds me of the time back in the early 90s when a computer had errored out trying to read the hard drive to boot. I noticed that I didn't hear the hard drive spinning. It was sitting flat on the desk with the monitor on top of it, so I grabbed it by the sides and quickly rotated it left and right along its vertical axis and then I heard the hard drive spin up. So I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and it booted. 👍😁 And that reminds me of the time in the late 90s or early 2000s that a computer wouldn't boot after being stood on its side instead of flat on the desk, so I put it back down flat and it worked again. Apparently the hard drive spindle or bearings were so worn that it could literally shift so much that it messed up the head alignment!
You forgot to try the No 1. tool for correcting bad sectors: HDD Regenerator. It tries to low level format the sectors again and usually half of the time is succesfull.
I guess the the WD Caviar 1100 is from an old Siemens Nixdorf Computer. There are few Programms to LowLevelFormat a Harddrive. On the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is MHDD, HDAT2 and Vivard the tools of choice.
I have used a program called hdd regenerator to save a disk once to the extent that atleast i could save the data on the disk as windows didnt want to even boot. Tho it wasnt free if i remember right.
My experience of DoubleSpace on a 386 was poor because of the cpu usage, it made disc access very very slow. I wouldn't try it with Windows 95 unless it's a fast system. 50kb of bad sectors is not something I would be overly concerned over. I wouldn't trust the drive long term but for one silly short term project I imagine it is completely fine
Honestly try Victoria for dos it has low level tools built in if there are left over spots left it can swap out to remap them it may work I used it on my 253mb Samsung drive which still works today I've had the drive sense the early 90's and it still powers a dos rig that doesn't get fired up enough anymore.
i have a 3tb WD purple drive with bad sectors. every time i scan it more bad sectors show up. i tried writing 1's and 0's to the entire drive and that seems to fix a lot of bad sectors, but after scanning the drive new bad sectos show up.
@@bitsundbolts yes, purples are for surveillance. crystaldisk says it has reallocated sectors and the number of these goes up when i write the disk. i got it from a friend who bought it on facebook marketplace for cheap. i knew the deal was too good to be true. he wanted me to install windows 8 on it. windows kept bsod randomly and i blamed the drive because it was so slow for random operations. i ran crystaldisk and turns out the drive had bad sectors. the drive reported only 16 hours of run time.
Even before MS DOS 6.x came out we had Data Becker Double Density, basically a cheaper clone of Stacker. And it worked. Made everything a bit slower, but I could install more games onto the harddisk. That was nice.
I used disk space or drive space, the one that came with DOS 6.22, I remember seeing that screen, but I never suffered data loss. I knew about the data loss issue with those solutions just a couple of years ago from youtube.
I did use drivespace. I don't recall corruption, but I don't know for sure either way. I do remember it was massively slower and I hated it for that reason. The best part of a new hard drive......is disabling drivespace. lol
Flobo bad sector for floppy disks, spinrite for old xt/286 class machines, hdd regenerator (old versionns) or HDrevitalize for 386 or 486’s, hdd regenerator or Hddguru (don’t remember so well) for windows xp machines
There is a tool called MHDD, quite complex to work with but it can scan hdd at a low level without hanging on bad sectors. often these sectors are only logicaly broken so it is possible to use MHDD to rewrite these sectors with zeroes and it always helped me to restore hdds. usually it is required to reformat hdd after such a repair.
I used that tool in the past. I think it's part of the 'ultimate boot disc/cdrom'. I still have plenty of old hard drives with errors - I'll give MHDD another try when I get to hard drives again.
@@bitsundbolts there is a website for this tool with documentation, worth a read before using it! also this tool have to be used from bootable floppy to give it full access to hardware as I remember, using it from windows will make it not as capable because of permissions etc..
Spinrite is the thing for that. I have fixed plenty old drives with capacities less than 500MB with that tool often successfully. It can take hours, yes but we have time, dont we? I use the latest version, i think 6.0 and especially when you have a drive where the very first sector is crap, you cannot format anything anymore, let Spinrite fix it and the drive will work again. Of course there are possibilites that there are mechanical errors on the surface, then even Spinrite cant help. But its better - and deeper - than scandisk.
Interesting video. I am afraid the sectors in the hard drive may be truly lost. I would normally expect the format command to mark sectors as bad too, but I guess this version in DOS only writes but doesn't verify. I believe there is a command line switch to make it do some sort of verify but I don't know if that helps. I remember Norton Utilities used to have a program similar to scandisk. This was usefull on old DOS installations without scandisk. I don't know if it's any better or different than scandisk. I believe it also has a disk testing utility but I don't know how helpfull that can be. I wish you all the best with this crazy idea. I'm looking forward to the next video. Oh and how affordable are diskettes in germany? I am looking to buy a few like you did. I'm from the Netherlands and consider having them shipped to me.
Now that you mentioned it, I have seen certain boot disks (Windows 98) to re-record bad sectors after formatting was complete. I guess this feature wasn't present in the version I used here (which I think was a Windows 95 boot disk). Regarding the diskettes: I found some very expensive at 15 euros per 10-pack, and some cheap ones 15+ packs (new!) 25 euros shipped for all. I bought them from local classifieds and got lucky. The diskettes in the video cost also around 25 euros shipped - a bit more than 6 euros per 10-pack.
@@bitsundbolts thanks for the comment. I've given it some thought but I think I'll go for a Gotek instead. It might cost double of a set of diskettes (40 euro locally) but it will be way more reliable and save me the time and frustration of finding working error-free diskettes to write disk images to.
HDD Regenerator works wonders. I usually use it to repair a drive with bad sectors just enough to get data off of it has saved me from a massive headache more then once.
I had 40MB HDD on my 286 and it was terrible. Had to delete and move files all the time to play new games. It had 15MB+ instalation of NortonCommander on it whitch i thought it was the OS.
Bad sector are the worst! As far as my knowledge goes (correct me if I'm wrong), forcing the drive going through the bad sectors further weakens it, should be avoided. However it is the only way to know about them, so we should test those sector the least possible.
For now, I'll keep the drive as is. Maybe later, I'll try to see if tools or bios low level format can do anything about those bad sectors - just to see if anything can be done or not.
I think no such tools are reliable enough. Especially in case when power might go out. I'm stuck with smaller than needed disk C, and can't decide to add some space to it from disk D for years because of this problem. It is better to just copy your data to second drive and recreate partitions on first drive from scratch. But it works only if you have second drive...
Id like to see what Steve Gibson's SpinRite could do with this drive. I'd recommend getting in contact with him and ask him about WORMs in the early 21st century.
Stacker, DriveSpace, and DoubleSpace were Russian roulette with your data. Hard drives were, are, and always have been extremely reliable. Software is not. When Windows crashes, or a driver goes haywire, or application software crashes, or you lose power, these are all opportunities for your compressed volume to become corrupt. These same hard drives that we were cursing would have worked fine uncompressed and probably would still work fine today. It was just a bad idea. Ext4 and other filesystems have mechanisms to deal with unexpected filesystem events. Moving that logic out of the filesystem driver is doomed to failure.
So, if it's possible to install Windows 95 on a compressed volume, DriveSpace needs to achieve a compression ratio of 1:1.4 to reach a bit more than 60MB 😳
@@bitsundbolts Using PCem I installed MS-DOS on an emulated CP-30064H (762 cyl, 4 heads, 39 spt) which is about 58MB formatted, compressed it leaving only 2MB on the host drive, rebooted, removed the DOS folder and config.sys, autoexec.bat and wina20.386 files from it. A typical installation fits on a 60MB drive without using compression, that step would have been useful only for a 40 MB drive... Then installed Windows 95 RTM OEM (4.0.950) and for some reason scandisk was unable to scan compressed drives, maybe it ran the scandisk from the boot floppy instead of the scandisk included on the CD-ROM, but anyway it allowed me to continue without having to restart the setup with special parameters. I selected the typical install and after having it installed I went to the Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Windows Setup and installed everything else. The compression ratio was 1:1.53 Then I installed drvspace 3 (included in Microsoft Plus! 95) configured it to use HiPack compression and upgraded the compressed drive to drvspace 3 format which by the way is not compatible with MS-DOS 6.22 drvspace drivers. I think you can replace the driver file and DOS will work fine but drvspace.exe won't load so you can't adjust the setting from DOS. The compression ratio was 1:1.80 Then I ran the Compression Agent, set the compression method to UltraPack for all files and recompressed the drive. With the 486DX4@100MHz it took a long time. The compression ratio was 1:2.35 I calculated those ratios myself by dividing the size of all files on the compressed drive by the size of the drvspace.000 file, in the drive properties in Windows Explorer it indicates the average compression ratio which also includes the uncompressed files not used by drvspace on the uncompressed drive, resulting in a lower ratio of 1:2.12
may as well try the freezer trick and any others on the Maxtor and any others that have issues, if ya already got the drive ya basically got nothin to lose by attempting it lol
I have a pile of 40 hard disks with half of them having issues, most of them a few bad sectors, some complete physical failure. In my experience the Seagate disks are the most unreliable. I've given up on using old disks altogether, because I simply don't trust them anymore. The only upside is you basically can hear or notice it's failing, which isn't true for SSD's.
some retro tech I don't like or flat out hate. I HATE CRTs. I completely and totally despise them. I run my C64 on a 4k monitor. I'm not really fond of hard drives either, but this is worse than that. That hard drive is so small it's practically pointless. I frequently ran into issues in the 90's where I ran out of space. It was frustrating. I'm not really nostalgic for that. One of the things I love about retro tech in the modern world is that you can get the enjoyable experience but with many of the classic limitations removed. Also when I was a kid i noticed my C64 was completely silent it was only the floppy that made sound. I believed that some day computers would be silent. My modern 2021 PC is for the most part. It is water cooled and uses NVME. 99% of the time I don't hear it and when I do, it's super quiet.
I'm not even surprised that WD drives are fine after those years, while seagate is showing bad sectors. I guess it developed bad sectors in first 2 years of it's existence, as every seagate does up until now. Maxtor is not surprising as well.
MHDD or Spinrite could help. MHDD is not as user friendly and can be quite slow on really bad HDDs, so arm yourself with patience and be prepared to leave it doing its thing overnight. Someone already suggested to use MHDD 3.0 and not the last available version as you have quite an old drive to fix. Google for the instructions on how to use the MHDD tool. If MHDD can't help, then I'd suggest you give up on that HDD.
Sometimes, it is just a bad format. I need to finish the video I've started a few months ago... Anyway, they're not really useful these days anymore - just for nostalgia
I guess you'd never want to use mfm and older drives like that. Drives from back in those days would have a list of bad sectors printed on a label with other drive parameters right from the factory.
@@GoatTheGoat Is this true even when SMART shows zero past relocations? Are these factory mapped, low level format skipped bad sectors then? Most of the hard disks i ever used never gained any relocations during their 10-ish years of use. I know i should probably replace disks after 5 years but well i don't always do that.
I was like you until I could no longer afford to be... heh. I have a drive that SMART began to claim "will fail in the next 24 hours" over a decade ago. I still use it as my "every day" drive. Turns out the automatic bad sector remapping area was full, so it can no longer silently remap newly failed sectors. Thus, it stalls trying to read/write any new bad sectors, and a couple *minutes* later will return an I/O error, which usually crashes the OS. OK... from a newb's standpoint (at the time) let's see what can be done... First step: Find the bad sectors, Turns out they're all in about a 1GB range on the disk. Try to low-level format... Fail. Repartition hard drive *around* the bad sectors (create a 1G partition over the bad sectors that will never be used, not even formatted, and other useable partitions around it). This was reliable enough to install an OS... then use it for a while... then use it as my main system for long enough I needed to run a backup and start thinking about what would happen if it got a new bad sector... Did some research... turns out unixes have a badblock marking utility just for the purpose, been standard IT practice for *ages.* Did enough research to be confident enough I could probably get my drive running again as reliably as it'd been without much hassle... *planned* to occasionally have to hand-mark bad blocks relatively often... make regular system backups... I've since used the drive for well over a decade in my main system, which has gone from an old iBook G4, to a atom-based system, to a RasPi, then another, and plausibly soon a newer atom... the iBook died due to the GPU BGA failure. The atom died when I tightened the board/heatsink down to its screwposts too hard (trace/BGA fracture?). The Pi was an emergency backup... the first one died due to a power surge due to a grounding problem in a 12VDC system with too many high current peripherals. The second Pi was a drop-in replacement, just glad I had a spare! Through all that, over many years, the drive has never had another I/O error/bad sector. ...much to my surprise. The only reformatting has been to the first (root) partition, to reload the OS appropriate to each CPU. The third partition being /home/ never had to be reformatted, still using the same user folder after all these years. Oh, I forgot, I *did* use Mac OSX 10.5 this way, with this partition-around mapping for the first few years... 'badblock', being a longtime unix de-facto utility was in there, too, I think. But again, it's never gotten a new bad sector! Hah! And if it weren't for that machine's ignoring SMART, and my USB converters, thereafter, I'd've been prompted with the "Drive will fail in the next 24 hours" boot message every day for all these years. Hah!
@@ericwazhung I mean a megabyte hunk with bad sectors plus remap exhaustion indicates a scratch in the surface from some sort of very undesirable physical event, which meant there was material bouncing around inside the chamber. Luckily it for sure got caught in a filter, and hopefully permanently so, though that cannot be strictly guaranteed.
I looked at one of my videos on UA-cam where I restore a 386 BIOS. Indeed, it seems to have HDD tools. Once I'm done with my project, I am going to test it! Thanks!
Years ago, I used a product called Spinrite made by Gibson Research. That software resurrected bad sectors on my Seagate st251 hard drive and I used that hard drive for many more years after Spinrite fixed it. I think the exact software name was Spinrite II. Hth.
I also used Spinrite II back in the day; I probably still have the retail package and floppy in storage. I first used it to fix a 32MB drive.
Spinrite is good, I've even used it to scan floppies.
Spinrite is still available and his website still sells it. Spinrite has the ability to "talk" directly to the drive. It's basically a software version of the BIOS but has more tools.
I was going to comment this as well, spinrite is a very nice tool.
Yes the early Spinrite was able to actually low level format a drive back in the MFM/RLL days. This was because before the introduction of IDE (integrated drive electronics), it was the computer controller card that actually told the drive motors what to do.
So with Spinrite you could reformat everything, change the interleave and do a remapping of the internal bad sector table, even change the drive from MFM to RLL (assuming your disk controller had firmware chip updated for RLL) gaining 50% more space.
With IDE (integrated drive electronics) actually controlling the drive was offloaded to the PCB on the drive and the computer just gave a command on what it wanted the drive to do (say read the sector located at cylinder 4, head 9, sector 7). It made life much simpler, but also took away that low level ability as there is no IDE/ATA command that actually reformats the drives.
So the best you can do is zero out the drive (which does not zero out the track/sector markers) and high level format from scratch.
A lot of my IDE drives have died over time but a few are still working. They are also very heavy for storing and these are the reasons I like to use flash based storage 😊
Phil I understand what you are saying but I love the sound of an old spinning disk. I still use mechanical drives obviously until they all die
@@Roadkill7878 cant you just connect both flash storage with the broken hdd and only redirect the ide commands to the broken hdd without relying on the response so we have noises while using the flash storage for retrieving the data?
Three things that might help:
1: Google 98 Lite. It might squash a 98 install small enough. Unfortunately Windows 98 isn't Windows 95.
2: Spinrite. You'll be sent to Gibson Research. He's a guy who's been doing things like this for a long time. He even has a test program for Zip drives for the "click of death". Spinrite can sometimes "exercise" and fix bad sectors pretty reliably.
3: Drivespace/Doublespace that's built into DOS 6.xx. The "Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95" had the latest version of Drivespace 3 that had even better drive compression.
Spinrite has been great for me. But though it can 'fix' bad sectors, you'd be best off to take the 'fixed' drive out of service asap afetr getting your data from it.
It can also scan pretty much any storage device it can see, floppies, zips, SD cards even ipods. I just with Steve would hurry up and finish the new version which uses a much better way to access the drives so recovering a 500Gb drive will no longer take 24+ hours.
About 30 years ago I started trying to save those dying HDDs using stuff like low level format, repartitioning, chkdsk, Scandisk, Partition Magic 4, WD and Seagate tools and some more.
It never worked out, the bad sectors almost became more and more in short times.
All in all roundabout 100 drives I tried to fix over the years (mostly by customer wishes).
IMO there are mainly 3 reasons for bad sectors:
Bad platter plating (e.g. Conner, Maxtor).
Particles, emitted by the dust filter hitting the platter surface and moving around.
Headcrash (quick death)
The first/most dying HDD brands in order and my experience:
Conner
Maxtor
Seagate
IBM
Fujitsu
Toshiba
...
WD
When I was young, I had lots of free time but no money at all. So I have done all of these things: drilling/cutting holes in diskettes/floppy drives to make them double sided, reformatting to get more capacity, using arj compress content, used Doublespace/Drivespace for more diskspace, tools like Quarterdeck QEMM for more memory, overclocking without knowing what I was doing... I learned so many things that are now absolutely obsolete and none of my younger coworkers have any idea what I'm talking about. I installed both Windows 95 AND Office 95 from floppy disk, which was a very time consuming excercise. All of this combined with questionable hardware (dumpster dive acquired VLB cards, buggy chipsets, leaky capacitors, shoddy power supplies, dying harddisks), but it still brings a smile on my face when someone else is going through the same paces on youtube, well done sir!
+1 here! (Greetings from Portugal)
Try using HDD Regenerator or SpinRite. In the past I was able to save a HDD using HDD Regenerator.
Back in the day, I used to collect ST157As... still love the sound of that spin up and still recognised it as soon as it came on screen.
Oh Gods, DriveSpace, that name brings back memories. It used to take days to compress a drive just for a few extra megabytes so I can have Doom and Jazz Jackrabbit installed at the same time. That was a fun time.
Have a look at HDAT2. A free and powerful DOS software that I use daily on my job to test and refurbish HDDs and SSDs. The drive is small. Wipe it 10 or 20 times and then run a read write read test. It might reduce or remove all bad sectors. With newer disks, the controller will reallocate those sectors and replace them with spares. Unfortunately, there's no such thing in such an old drive, as far as I know
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll give it a try.
Yup, other ones that come to mind are HDD Regenerator(paid), SpinRite, HDDScan, and MHDD (for older drives).
HDAT2 is my favorite though.
A modern-ish tool i like to use to repair bad sectors (even on drives as new as 2000 in my experience) is called victoria disk utility. There are special modes within the program that can force write to bad sectors, or do long write cycles to magnetize bad sectors. It needs windows XP or later, but if you have a system that runs XP and has a proper IDE controller, it is very handy. This tool can run on modern versions of windows as well, but it is mostly designed for XP.
I have exactly this hard drive. Got it in 1992 when I was 4 years old and it was still in use in 1997 in a secondary PC for DOS gaming since many games didn't like Windows 95. Then it was still in use as a secondary hard drive in a Windows 98 PC (along with a 1 GB one - it made no sense but why not). In the 1st of May 2000 the motherboard of that PC got fried and I put that hard disk away. It's still somewhere in the attic but it might no longer turn on as it's sleeping since 23 years now, most probably some components or the disk itself has been damaged during the years.
I actually had to salvage data and recover an old HDD from a very important official's system many years ago.
The drive was a 40GB if I recall correctly. After salvaging all the data I could, I ran low level scans a few times. But this computer was so mission critical, i didn't take any chances.
I read over where all the bad blocks were found, then I literally brute forced it with a hex disk editor and marked the *entire* regions as bad blocks, rather than count on disk scanning software to tell me there's a few 'good' sectors in these otherwise obvious bad regions.
After I reformatted it and reinstalled the OS, with my custom written bad sectors, everything worked perfectly!
In this case, reliability was *way* more important than available space. I think it only knocked out like 2MB of a 40GB drive, but yeah I didn't want this official coming back within a month or three because a random sector went bad in a known bad region, so I just brute force wrote the entire larger sections as bad.
No its not easy to do that way, but when it comes to a mission critical system (and an organization not in any hurry to replace damaged parts), I didn't want to be held liable for any future failures.
There were some configurable win95 versions released to oem's for their own customization. Some copies are available online if you poke around enough. You select the components you want and leave the ones you don't out. A lot like the embedded versions ms used to release for hw manufacturers. You can definitely get the install down to 15-20mb depending on what features you want.
Thanks for the tip! Great fallback solution if the other installation fails for whatever reason!
I'd definitely check into spinrite. Steve Gibson used to be the "master" with that fine software back in those days for sure. Yes, it's sometimes slow, however, slow and steady wins the race, as "they" say, lol.
I think I tried something called "stacker" back in the days as my HDD was indeed a 40MB HDD and I could barely have Windows (3.11) and a few programs there before it was full. I remember when we ran the program and showed double capacity! Wow! Still, when actual data was stored, the final actual capacity was more or less the same.
I remember watching a video about these programs, one turned out to be just a GUI, no actual compression. It was pure, 100% marketing :D
That sounds like RamDoubler or so - it was just having a few fancy gauges to show you your free memory, but it didn't actually do anything, let alone double your memory.
Stacker was a legitimate disk compression tool. Microsoft tried to license it but didn't want to pay enough and integrated a different product for DoubleSpace. Stac won a lawsuit against MS resulting in MS-DOS 6.21 with compression removed and then 6.22 with DriveSpace, which used a different, non-infringing algorithm.
I was always using NDD (Norton Disk Doctor) to test HDD and floppy surface and mark bad sectors. It was way better than scandisk. It could, however, destroy/damage the data on the drive if you allow it to fix "logical" problems, like, say, "disk structure". So be careful.
I've had an idea in my mind for a while now. It's a simple idea, but difficult To Implement. The idea is to get the sound of an old HDD while using a modern SD to IDE. If someone could make a device that can use old spinning HDDs that no longer work, but still spin and have a working head arm. If we could use the LED of an SD to IDE that is connected to a spinning HDD and have the LED flashes to make the HDD move the drive arm. I think it could save many old HDDs from the dump and would bring back the sound and feeling of old PCs. I know a speaker device this available, but nothing can replace sound of a real spinning drive.
:)
Personally I would recommend MHDD or Victoria, of course DOS versions. These programs can test whole surface of the drive, try to relocate bad sectors or fix them if it's possible. Very useful tools and if I remember well they are available on Hirens Boot 15.2 package ;)
These are very good tools, I agree. Was going to recommend them too.
I would agree. You could probably use Victoria to forcibly perform a write action with random data on the offending LBA’s several times to see if they come good before trying to do a read/write test on it.
does those caviar hdd's still have little socket in one of those 2 cutouts in the casting on the oposite side than ide connector? if yes you can install led in it and hdd would have bussy light separate to one on the motherboard, older hdd's had a led soldered on them, newer were equiped with sockets and later this feature was droped, but you could have rgb hdd in the early 90's
I've used disk compression - these were desperate times, HDDs were super small - but it was SO SO SLOW, especially on the miserable CPU I must have had back then, that it was basically unusable.
This seems a good place to ask: I have a dvd-RW with family videos on it, which has been formatted almost 15 years ago;
when I try to insert it in my disk reader, it spins up, clicks a little, and spins down.
For other disks of the same type, everything works fine (I was able to get everything on them, with some minor details or scene losses).
Any idea on what might be happening? My theory is that the disk reader is unable to find the beginning of the track, or something like that.
The idea was to take an entire image/copy of the disk (2G), and use some other tool like photorec to analyze the data (basically all VOB files, and some images), but being unable to read it in the first place stumped me, and online searches didnireally help.
Anyway, very interesting video, will keep an eye on this.
Did you try an unconditional format of the drive using the /U option? I use that sometimes with old floppy disks and do a second "normal" format afterwards to make sure the bad sectors have not returned and were only caused by drive head alignment issues and not actual physical damage of the disk. Don't know if the same can/does apply to a harddisk. Perhaps you can try?
I did not try anything on this drive yet apart from the regular format. I reached out to Steve Gibson (Gibson Research Corporation) for SpinRite. I exchanged a few mails with him and I am set to let SpinRite 3.1 do some magic! This will be an exciting project, but I don't want to say too much yet!
@@bitsundbolts Looking forward to the follow-up video 😉
My first attempt to install Win 95 was on a 40MB drive. Back then I didn't know upfront that you couldn't compress the content on the drive to gain space (According to the Win95 installer) - I tried everything I could at the time in order to get 95 running on my system, but I had no luck until I bought a new drive - a 4.3GB Maxtor.
-----
I love the sound of old drives and still want to use them for nostalgia in some systems, but I've also picked up a lot of 2.5" SATA platter drives for retro use due to the reliability issues of older drive models. It's too bad they're so quiet, but with a computer on top of a desk and a drive mounted upfront, you can at least still get some semblence of days past, and better accuracy then something like the HDD Clicker.
SSDs work fine for some situations too, but it's not something I trust for data integrity, if a machine may be powered off for a few years. Alternatively, SLC drives or CF cards are pretty trustworthy. A 500GB platter drive shortstroked to a smaller size performs extremely well on older systems. Then there's the SSD-cached HDDs that have 8GB of SSD cache, to keep them fast, but backed by magnetic storage for offline data integrity. $5/for a "SSHD" drive is a pretty great deal.
"Limitations" - beyond my original 486 system, I always bought large drives that I could never fill (had the 4.3GB drive in my late model 486DX4), and usually more RAM than I ever needed too (kept disk i/o and swap bottlenecks to a minimum). I've never been one to like a sluggish system, and back in the mid to late 90's, those were usually the bottlenecks for anything besides game framerates. As one can imagine, computers stalling out in performance improvements, and software having become extremely bloated for over a decade now, computers and software today have gotten aggrevating to use.
But I still like to hear the mechanical clicking today. Fan noise not so much (late 90's watercooling to the rescue), and I was happy to get rid of HDD noise in my main system at some point where SSDs got large enough for OS AND data, but for my retro systems, and servers where the i/o limitations don't waste my time, I still enjoy hearing my activity provide acoustic feedback.
10 years ago, WD SSHDs tended to have their flash overheat(?) and fail. One of my laptop drives from that time reported an unrecoverable sector failure or something, and I no longer trust it with any data (currently don't have a use for it).
I could be mistaken, but I think a lot of newer drives have their accoustics setting to quiet by default... You might squeeze some more noise (and performance?) out of those quieter drives if you can change those settings in the BIOS, and/or find some [linux?] utility to change their defaults... Maybe something SMART-related or 'hdparm' comes to mind (with little knowledge off-hand).
Yes. Used all those tools, and I miss detailed scandisk. I have fiddled with partition tables at interrupt level to hide/unhide things. Patched interrupt 19 to give someone a can't do that message using ctrl-alt-delete. 😅
Interrupt 13 for direct access to disks was common. I still have a PC setup with multiple plug in drive cradles and can even handle, god forbid, zip drives.
I regularly retrive old stuff from even 720k floppies and external apple drives, rescuing data, which apple mostly destroys any way.🎉😂
Formatting from the command line doesn't actually zero out the sectors as I understood it, rather it does a quick format and tests each sector for readability.
Using /f is for quick.
This video made me remember my ps3's hdd for bad sectors
I can recall my quantum bigfoot, it came inside my first computer and took up the full drive bay
Fun video, thanks for the upload
I use three disk utilities for intensive work: Gibson Research's SpinRite 6 (it's about $80 online, boots from DOS, best for old drives on computers made before Intel's i-series CPUs (Core2 or earlier)); Crystal Disk Info (donation-ware, runs in Windows 7/10/11, better for newer drives on newer computers including NVMe), and HDAT2 on the Ultimate Boot CD 5.11 (free downloadable ISO, boots in DOS, works best on Core2 or earlier). SpinRite is my go-to, especially when data recovery is important. The others are also good for disk wiping, viewing in-depth SMART statistics, and setting disk parameters such as acoustic mode and idle timeouts. For Macs, the best Classic options are LaCie's SilverLining or FWB's Hard Disk Toolkit; on modern Macs I just pull the disk and run the diagnostics in a PC.
I didn't use drivespace but I have memories of installing Windows95 from floppies in my primary schools "IT" classroom. We packaged the install files with winzip and extracted them from floppies onto the harddrives and started the installs from there.
i messed around with micro95 years ago, it's basically like 98lite, it's just a set of inf's for win95a's installer that makes it so small you could fit win95 into a 4mb ramdisk. of course it's also barely functional, but you have explorer and notepad and a few other things. you can add back needed runtime dll's by extracting whatever you need from the cab's off the install disks.
god it's oddly terrifying to have a program tell you it detected physical damage
Did you try a low level format? We use to throw that around like spaghetti in the 90's, it was something released before seatools, also by Seagate, it was a dedicated low level format utility.
No, I have not yet used any other formatting tools than the ones seen in the video. I read that low level formatting may cause issues in certain cases. I didn't want to jeopardize the upcoming videos and went with a simple DOS format. It seems to be good enough for me to continue for now, but I'll definitely try different things later!
My first IBM PS2 486 came with drive space already enabled. I didn't even know it was at the time, as I'm sure most consumers didn't. It was only a 200MB native HDD I think. I feel like they stopped shipping systems like that by default around Windows 95 as it probably generated too many complaints.
Try with HDD Regenerator. It's more of a tool to recover data than to actually "repair" a drive, as it is not unusual for the bad sectors to "reappear" (and for new bad sectors to appear on an already unreliable drive, of course), but for old and test drives where data loss is not a concern it's a great tool.
Doublespace or Drivespace? Never used those. Back in the DOS 5.0 days, I used similar software called Stacker. I don't remember having any corruption issues, but it was pretty slow reading or writing to the drive.
Yeah, I heard of Stacker. DoubleSpace was introduced with MS-DOS 6, if I'm not mistaken. It was a response to DR-DOS having Disk compression for several months prior.
I used Stacker before the DblSpace/DriveSpace days. Oh and today I often scan HDDs and SSDs with HDD Regenerator which is advertised with its supposed ability to recover bad sectors as in making them usable again - but I haven't ever tried this function and I don't even know if it's there in the freeware version, maybe with limitations...?
I have 2 IBM Quantum Fireball 30Gb drives in my 98 retro machine. Not for use purely for the sound that echo's throughout the case while using it.
5:50 when i was a kid, i saw my cousin sometimes using pcs with that screen, i always though it was some kind of game, like you make a law and see how many ppl in the parlament would approve or something, so i always watched that with pleasure while my cousin was either bored enough to leave the room, or angry.
DRevitalize has a sector repair feature. And MHDD is a useful tool for detecting bad sectors.
MHDD - as well as Victoria
I often use Dban to format drives with sector problems as it wipes all data including partitions, locked sectors etc. or I more often use WD Data Life Guard to write zeroes to the drive which also can rejuvenate or remap sectors if the drive supports it. typically if the drive is too old to have spare sectors it can remap to it is harder to get reliable. but if the drive has sectors that are bad because it was interrupted or otherwise corrupted for other reasons than actual physical damage then Dban and WDDLG might actually fix it. I done this a lot to fix drives. I am sure your WD Drives have Smart capability for remapping sectors and you could use software to check if they have done so, it is pretty common your older drives already have damaged sectors it have remapped but then it won´t show up in scandisk as it just uses a spare sector for it instead. it is when Scandisk show bad sectors you are in more trouble as it might either A: have no spare sectors, or B not yet remapped it, C: sector is too broken to remap, or D: the drive have run out of spare sectors. or some other reasons. you could also have a phenomenon called sector rot, or disk rot, when the drive been sitting for so long the magnetic flux have faded away and it can no longer make a self test or read write correctly, if it have not gone too long it might also work after you write zeroes to all sectors again to renew the magnetic field
I've managed to fix weak / bad sectors on a Samsung drive, obviously not that old a 2TB from 15 years ago. What tool did I use... none, I made my own bash shell script in Linux to read block by block and write down all the sectors that were unreadable, I had to do this myself because every time the drive tried to read a bad sector the drive itself would crash and give out IO error on the SATA bus, sometimes it would kernel panic the OS. I top note, if your drive kernel panics the OS, connect it via a sata to usb adaptor it at least wont crash your chipset and only crash the adaptor instead.
Next I read all those bad / weak sectors into another script and either got DD to inverse the value of the read sector (I chose to read 10 times to get the data) and write it back to disk, then write the original data back, or if the sector was 100% broken try to write a 0 then a 1.
I then made script run the entire process about 500 times.
Now the drive thinks there is nothing wrong and smart says the drive is 100% fine and read and writing to the drive does not crash my OS. I was also able to retrieve all the data back from the drive, the bad sectors didn't actually have any real data on them which is kinda lucky, bu the weak sectors did (the ones i had to read 5 - 10 times for it to get the data).
No idea why that worked, or why I thought to even try doing that, or why it fixed it but 🙃.
As for drive compression, that is still a thing. BTRFS filesystem on Linux has built in compression at kernel level so you can use a variety of compression techniques, including my favourite zstd, a really fast and good compression technique made by Facebook of all companies. Not only to you use less space but the data reads faster, it's even fast enough to be usable on SSDs at the lower compression levels. It also intelligently works out if something is compressible, so not everything is compressed if there is no benefit.
I always used Spinrite by Gibson Research for situations like you have for the Seagate.
There were times when I was using 100mb hard drive with drivespace. No errors, no data loss. Also used it for ramdisk (as I had 32mb of ram and could give 24 to ramdisk and install/copy a game like DukeNukem3D on it.)
The sound of the hard drive spinning reminds me of the time back in the early 90s when a computer had errored out trying to read the hard drive to boot. I noticed that I didn't hear the hard drive spinning. It was sitting flat on the desk with the monitor on top of it, so I grabbed it by the sides and quickly rotated it left and right along its vertical axis and then I heard the hard drive spin up. So I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and it booted. 👍😁
And that reminds me of the time in the late 90s or early 2000s that a computer wouldn't boot after being stood on its side instead of flat on the desk, so I put it back down flat and it worked again. Apparently the hard drive spindle or bearings were so worn that it could literally shift so much that it messed up the head alignment!
You forgot to try the No 1. tool for correcting bad sectors: HDD Regenerator. It tries to low level format the sectors again and usually half of the time is succesfull.
I put it on the list. Depends which ones I can try as I'd prefer freeware.
I guess the the WD Caviar 1100 is from an old Siemens Nixdorf Computer.
There are few Programms to LowLevelFormat a Harddrive. On the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is MHDD, HDAT2 and Vivard the tools of choice.
I have used a program called hdd regenerator to save a disk once to the extent that atleast i could save the data on the disk as windows didnt want to even boot. Tho it wasnt free if i remember right.
My experience of DoubleSpace on a 386 was poor because of the cpu usage, it made disc access very very slow. I wouldn't try it with Windows 95 unless it's a fast system. 50kb of bad sectors is not something I would be overly concerned over. I wouldn't trust the drive long term but for one silly short term project I imagine it is completely fine
Honestly try Victoria for dos it has low level tools built in if there are left over spots left it can swap out to remap them it may work I used it on my 253mb Samsung drive which still works today I've had the drive sense the early 90's and it still powers a dos rig that doesn't get fired up enough anymore.
i have a 3tb WD purple drive with bad sectors. every time i scan it more bad sectors show up. i tried writing 1's and 0's to the entire drive and that seems to fix a lot of bad sectors, but after scanning the drive new bad sectos show up.
That sounds like an unreliable drive - or a feature? Purples are the surveillance drives, aren't they?
@@bitsundbolts yes, purples are for surveillance. crystaldisk says it has reallocated sectors and the number of these goes up when i write the disk.
i got it from a friend who bought it on facebook marketplace for cheap. i knew the deal was too good to be true.
he wanted me to install windows 8 on it. windows kept bsod randomly and i blamed the drive because it was so slow for random operations. i ran crystaldisk and turns out the drive had bad sectors. the drive reported only 16 hours of run time.
Even before MS DOS 6.x came out we had Data Becker Double Density, basically a cheaper clone of Stacker. And it worked. Made everything a bit slower, but I could install more games onto the harddisk. That was nice.
I used disk space or drive space, the one that came with DOS 6.22, I remember seeing that screen, but I never suffered data loss. I knew about the data loss issue with those solutions just a couple of years ago from youtube.
I did use drivespace. I don't recall corruption, but I don't know for sure either way. I do remember it was massively slower and I hated it for that reason. The best part of a new hard drive......is disabling drivespace. lol
Flobo bad sector for floppy disks, spinrite for old xt/286 class machines, hdd regenerator (old versionns) or HDrevitalize for 386 or 486’s, hdd regenerator or Hddguru (don’t remember so well) for windows xp machines
There is a tool called MHDD, quite complex to work with but it can scan hdd at a low level without hanging on bad sectors. often these sectors are only logicaly broken so it is possible to use MHDD to rewrite these sectors with zeroes and it always helped me to restore hdds. usually it is required to reformat hdd after such a repair.
I used that tool in the past. I think it's part of the 'ultimate boot disc/cdrom'. I still have plenty of old hard drives with errors - I'll give MHDD another try when I get to hard drives again.
@@bitsundbolts there is a website for this tool with documentation, worth a read before using it! also this tool have to be used from bootable floppy to give it full access to hardware as I remember, using it from windows will make it not as capable because of permissions etc..
Spinrite is the thing for that. I have fixed plenty old drives with capacities less than 500MB with that tool often successfully. It can take hours, yes but we have time, dont we? I use the latest version, i think 6.0 and especially when you have a drive where the very first sector is crap, you cannot format anything anymore, let Spinrite fix it and the drive will work again. Of course there are possibilites that there are mechanical errors on the surface, then even Spinrite cant help. But its better - and deeper - than scandisk.
Interesting video. I am afraid the sectors in the hard drive may be truly lost. I would normally expect the format command to mark sectors as bad too, but I guess this version in DOS only writes but doesn't verify. I believe there is a command line switch to make it do some sort of verify but I don't know if that helps.
I remember Norton Utilities used to have a program similar to scandisk. This was usefull on old DOS installations without scandisk. I don't know if it's any better or different than scandisk. I believe it also has a disk testing utility but I don't know how helpfull that can be.
I wish you all the best with this crazy idea. I'm looking forward to the next video.
Oh and how affordable are diskettes in germany? I am looking to buy a few like you did. I'm from the Netherlands and consider having them shipped to me.
Now that you mentioned it, I have seen certain boot disks (Windows 98) to re-record bad sectors after formatting was complete. I guess this feature wasn't present in the version I used here (which I think was a Windows 95 boot disk).
Regarding the diskettes: I found some very expensive at 15 euros per 10-pack, and some cheap ones 15+ packs (new!) 25 euros shipped for all. I bought them from local classifieds and got lucky.
The diskettes in the video cost also around 25 euros shipped - a bit more than 6 euros per 10-pack.
@@bitsundbolts thanks for the comment. I've given it some thought but I think I'll go for a Gotek instead. It might cost double of a set of diskettes (40 euro locally) but it will be way more reliable and save me the time and frustration of finding working error-free diskettes to write disk images to.
Yes, the gotek is a way better option. I am using one too, but you know, for the sake of content, I am willing to get old floppy disks 🙂
Some motherboard bios allow for low level formatting of the the drive that would fix most bad sectors if it's not physically damaged
HDD Regenerator works wonders. I usually use it to repair a drive with bad sectors just enough to get data off of it has saved me from a massive headache more then once.
I may give it a try, but first, I need to investigate SpinRite after having a great discussion with Steve Gibson, the author of SpinRite!
@@bitsundbolts Hope it all goes well 👍 either way wish you best of luck.
I would suggest using Spinrite 6.0 or 6.1 beta to see what it makes of that Seagate drive. In all probability they are bad but you never know 🙂🤷♂️
I had 40MB HDD on my 286 and it was terrible. Had to delete and move files all the time to play new games. It had 15MB+ instalation of NortonCommander on it whitch i thought it was the OS.
Bad sector are the worst! As far as my knowledge goes (correct me if I'm wrong), forcing the drive going through the bad sectors further weakens it, should be avoided. However it is the only way to know about them, so we should test those sector the least possible.
For now, I'll keep the drive as is. Maybe later, I'll try to see if tools or bios low level format can do anything about those bad sectors - just to see if anything can be done or not.
Don't trust Partition Magic to re-partition your drive with precious data on it; that's all I have to say.
I learned this the hard way.
I think no such tools are reliable enough. Especially in case when power might go out.
I'm stuck with smaller than needed disk C, and can't decide to add some space to it from disk D for years because of this problem.
It is better to just copy your data to second drive and recreate partitions on first drive from scratch. But it works only if you have second drive...
i once low level formated a quantum 50mb hdd to 80mb and during that it exploded :]
those were fun days
Id like to see what Steve Gibson's SpinRite could do with this drive. I'd recommend getting in contact with him and ask him about WORMs in the early 21st century.
can you share that cd-rom in archive?
Yes, I can. I'll share the details once done.
@@bitsundbolts thanks
Stacker, DriveSpace, and DoubleSpace were Russian roulette with your data. Hard drives were, are, and always have been extremely reliable. Software is not. When Windows crashes, or a driver goes haywire, or application software crashes, or you lose power, these are all opportunities for your compressed volume to become corrupt. These same hard drives that we were cursing would have worked fine uncompressed and probably would still work fine today. It was just a bad idea. Ext4 and other filesystems have mechanisms to deal with unexpected filesystem events. Moving that logic out of the filesystem driver is doomed to failure.
Maybe it is good idea to try some more powerful tools like MHDD or HDAT2, especially the latter.
I don't remember but I'm almost sure you can install Windows 95 on a 60MB drive but without any free space for other programs.
So, if it's possible to install Windows 95 on a compressed volume, DriveSpace needs to achieve a compression ratio of 1:1.4 to reach a bit more than 60MB 😳
@@bitsundbolts Using PCem I installed MS-DOS on an emulated CP-30064H (762 cyl, 4 heads, 39 spt) which is about 58MB formatted, compressed it leaving only 2MB on the host drive, rebooted, removed the DOS folder and config.sys, autoexec.bat and wina20.386 files from it.
A typical installation fits on a 60MB drive without using compression, that step would have been useful only for a 40 MB drive...
Then installed Windows 95 RTM OEM (4.0.950) and for some reason scandisk was unable to scan compressed drives, maybe it ran the scandisk from the boot floppy instead of the scandisk included on the CD-ROM, but anyway it allowed me to continue without having to restart the setup with special parameters.
I selected the typical install and after having it installed I went to the Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs -> Windows Setup and installed everything else.
The compression ratio was 1:1.53
Then I installed drvspace 3 (included in Microsoft Plus! 95) configured it to use HiPack compression and upgraded the compressed drive to drvspace 3 format which by the way is not compatible with MS-DOS 6.22 drvspace drivers. I think you can replace the driver file and DOS will work fine but drvspace.exe won't load so you can't adjust the setting from DOS.
The compression ratio was 1:1.80
Then I ran the Compression Agent, set the compression method to UltraPack for all files and recompressed the drive. With the 486DX4@100MHz it took a long time.
The compression ratio was 1:2.35
I calculated those ratios myself by dividing the size of all files on the compressed drive by the size of the drvspace.000 file, in the drive properties in Windows Explorer it indicates the average compression ratio which also includes the uncompressed files not used by drvspace on the uncompressed drive, resulting in a lower ratio of 1:2.12
Oh nooo the sound of that hard drive brought back memories. Not good ones though. I really hated that sound. Also drive-space bad memories there too.
may as well try the freezer trick and any others on the Maxtor and any others that have issues, if ya already got the drive ya basically got nothin to lose by attempting it lol
I have a pile of 40 hard disks with half of them having issues, most of them a few bad sectors, some complete physical failure. In my experience the Seagate disks are the most unreliable. I've given up on using old disks altogether, because I simply don't trust them anymore. The only upside is you basically can hear or notice it's failing, which isn't true for SSD's.
some retro tech I don't like or flat out hate. I HATE CRTs. I completely and totally despise them. I run my C64 on a 4k monitor. I'm not really fond of hard drives either, but this is worse than that. That hard drive is so small it's practically pointless. I frequently ran into issues in the 90's where I ran out of space. It was frustrating. I'm not really nostalgic for that. One of the things I love about retro tech in the modern world is that you can get the enjoyable experience but with many of the classic limitations removed. Also when I was a kid i noticed my C64 was completely silent it was only the floppy that made sound. I believed that some day computers would be silent. My modern 2021 PC is for the most part. It is water cooled and uses NVME. 99% of the time I don't hear it and when I do, it's super quiet.
With a drive like that i would power it to clean the air before I let the heads move.
I'm not even surprised that WD drives are fine after those years, while seagate is showing bad sectors. I guess it developed bad sectors in first 2 years of it's existence, as every seagate does up until now. Maxtor is not surprising as well.
With RLL drives bad sectors was never an issue for me.
(Added: I mean they all had them)
I have that Maxtor 800mb drive !! Still works, extremely noisy though
Mine just spins up, but then nothing else happens 😞
@@bitsundbolts at shame. The drive limits my download speed 😂
Ah, the ST-157A.
B Terror. Scary and expensive.
no win 98?
Win98 needs a lot more space. I don't think any drive compression will be able to help, if I want to use this specific hard Disk from Seagate.
try SpinRite and hdat2
It's not for no reason that Double Space gained the nickname Trouble Space...
SpinRite won't fix it , but it'll mark the sectors / clusters unusable and then the rest of the drive us usable.
I hate drivespace cause it is VERY VERY SLOW (Vietnam flashbacks unlocked)
try "spinrite" by gibson research
MHDD or Spinrite could help. MHDD is not as user friendly and can be quite slow on really bad HDDs, so arm yourself with patience and be prepared to leave it doing its thing overnight. Someone already suggested to use MHDD 3.0 and not the last available version as you have quite an old drive to fix. Google for the instructions on how to use the MHDD tool. If MHDD can't help, then I'd suggest you give up on that HDD.
Bad Sector Scan Tool - Vivard
disk genius can verify and fix bad sectors for free
Hdd regenerator maybe
😂😂mine sound like dirt bike getting crazy 🤣
I like the part where you say the model number as if nobody ever put one on youtube before.
Newer drives deal with bad sectors by remapping them to spare sectors. I doubt that these old ones can do that.
As soon as you see 1 BAD SECTOR, throw the drive away. It will only get worse.
Sometimes, it is just a bad format. I need to finish the video I've started a few months ago... Anyway, they're not really useful these days anymore - just for nostalgia
I could never trust a drive with even a single bad sector.
I guess you'd never want to use mfm and older drives like that. Drives from back in those days would have a list of bad sectors printed on a label with other drive parameters right from the factory.
Every HDD has bad sectors. The drive automatically works around them.
@@GoatTheGoat Is this true even when SMART shows zero past relocations? Are these factory mapped, low level format skipped bad sectors then? Most of the hard disks i ever used never gained any relocations during their 10-ish years of use. I know i should probably replace disks after 5 years but well i don't always do that.
I was like you until I could no longer afford to be... heh.
I have a drive that SMART began to claim "will fail in the next 24 hours" over a decade ago. I still use it as my "every day" drive. Turns out the automatic bad sector remapping area was full, so it can no longer silently remap newly failed sectors. Thus, it stalls trying to read/write any new bad sectors, and a couple *minutes* later will return an I/O error, which usually crashes the OS.
OK... from a newb's standpoint (at the time) let's see what can be done... First step: Find the bad sectors, Turns out they're all in about a 1GB range on the disk. Try to low-level format... Fail. Repartition hard drive *around* the bad sectors (create a 1G partition over the bad sectors that will never be used, not even formatted, and other useable partitions around it). This was reliable enough to install an OS... then use it for a while... then use it as my main system for long enough I needed to run a backup and start thinking about what would happen if it got a new bad sector...
Did some research... turns out unixes have a badblock marking utility just for the purpose, been standard IT practice for *ages.* Did enough research to be confident enough I could probably get my drive running again as reliably as it'd been without much hassle... *planned* to occasionally have to hand-mark bad blocks relatively often... make regular system backups...
I've since used the drive for well over a decade in my main system, which has gone from an old iBook G4, to a atom-based system, to a RasPi, then another, and plausibly soon a newer atom... the iBook died due to the GPU BGA failure. The atom died when I tightened the board/heatsink down to its screwposts too hard (trace/BGA fracture?). The Pi was an emergency backup... the first one died due to a power surge due to a grounding problem in a 12VDC system with too many high current peripherals. The second Pi was a drop-in replacement, just glad I had a spare!
Through all that, over many years, the drive has never had another I/O error/bad sector. ...much to my surprise. The only reformatting has been to the first (root) partition, to reload the OS appropriate to each CPU. The third partition being /home/ never had to be reformatted, still using the same user folder after all these years.
Oh, I forgot, I *did* use Mac OSX 10.5 this way, with this partition-around mapping for the first few years... 'badblock', being a longtime unix de-facto utility was in there, too, I think.
But again, it's never gotten a new bad sector! Hah! And if it weren't for that machine's ignoring SMART, and my USB converters, thereafter, I'd've been prompted with the "Drive will fail in the next 24 hours" boot message every day for all these years. Hah!
@@ericwazhung I mean a megabyte hunk with bad sectors plus remap exhaustion indicates a scratch in the surface from some sort of very undesirable physical event, which meant there was material bouncing around inside the chamber. Luckily it for sure got caught in a filter, and hopefully permanently so, though that cannot be strictly guaranteed.
2:25 Well, except complain.
thy HDD Regenerator
I had one fo these, 40megabytes
HDD Regenerator
ST-157A was the worst and most unreliable drives in the world
I have another one in Germany. I just need to find it. I wonder how the condition of that drive is.
Only low level format in bios
I think this may be the first option I'll try - since it's free and I do have boards that support that feature.
@@bitsundbolts I did this many years ago. look for 386 with low level format in bios. it really works
I looked at one of my videos on UA-cam where I restore a 386 BIOS.
Indeed, it seems to have HDD tools.
Once I'm done with my project, I am going to test it! Thanks!
@@bitsundbolts You're welcome