Vista - Vista help needed

Back in the hay day of PCs, Norton's Disk Test would test for bad sectors
and, if found, would mark them as bad so Windows would not use them. The
Norton test requirements were more stringent than Windows so any sector that
passed Norton's test would pass Windows requirements. Is there a Vista
supported product on the market today that will do this? All the adverts
talk about data recovery. I'm more interested in fault prevention. Where
is Peter Norton when you need him (no offense Symantec). Thanks...

doesn't scandisk/checkdisk do this for you.



mikeyhsd@comcast.net



"William Beard" <wabeard6596@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:4C64FE7F-5D4C-4DB9-A8C5-FD3B3D70D312@microsoft.com...
Back in the hay day of PCs, Norton's Disk Test would test for bad sectors
and, if found, would mark them as bad so Windows would not use them. The
Norton test requirements were more stringent than Windows so any sector that
passed Norton's test would pass Windows requirements. Is there a Vista
supported product on the market today that will do this? All the adverts
talk about data recovery. I'm more interested in fault prevention. Where
is Peter Norton when you need him (no offense Symantec). Thanks...

Chkdsk with the /R (for repair) parameter does the same thing. Hard disks
have come a long way since then and they are so much bigger. There is no
substitute for good backups.

"William Beard" wrote:

> Back in the hay day of PCs, Norton's Disk Test would test for bad sectors
> and, if found, would mark them as bad so Windows would not use them. The
> Norton test requirements were more stringent than Windows so any sector that
> passed Norton's test would pass Windows requirements. Is there a Vista
> supported product on the market today that will do this? All the adverts
> talk about data recovery. I'm more interested in fault prevention. Where
> is Peter Norton when you need him (no offense Symantec). Thanks...
>

Hi William,

Today the hard drives have built-in smarts, and do this themselves. They
also often have built-in buffering, so the OS is not really talking to the
hard
drive a lot of the time, but working with the buffers.

By the way, SpinRite was another good tool for fixing hard drives in it's
day. I think there may be a modern version of it available, but I don't
know exactly what it does now.

-- Larry Maturo


"William Beard" <wabeard6596@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:4C64FE7F-5D4C-4DB9-A8C5-FD3B3D70D312@microsoft.com...
> Back in the hay day of PCs, Norton's Disk Test would test for bad sectors
> and, if found, would mark them as bad so Windows would not use them. The
> Norton test requirements were more stringent than Windows so any sector
> that passed Norton's test would pass Windows requirements. Is there a
> Vista supported product on the market today that will do this? All the
> adverts talk about data recovery. I'm more interested in fault
> prevention. Where is Peter Norton when you need him (no offense
> Symantec). Thanks...
>

SpinRite is alive and well and living on www.grc.com. It's up to version 6
and supports NTFS. I've been using it since the days of MFM drives. I just
recently used it to repair an EIDE drive (WinXP) with some bad spots. It's a
great tool to have...you never know when you'll need it. It's a little
pricey at first until it saves your data the first time...then it suddenly
becomes rather inexpensive.

Tim

"Larry Maturo" <lmaturo@imceda.com> wrote in message
news:u0hg4AwoHHA.1216@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> Hi William,
>
> Today the hard drives have built-in smarts, and do this themselves. They
> also often have built-in buffering, so the OS is not really talking to the
> hard
> drive a lot of the time, but working with the buffers.
>
> By the way, SpinRite was another good tool for fixing hard drives in it's
> day. I think there may be a modern version of it available, but I don't
> know exactly what it does now.
>
> -- Larry Maturo
>
>
> "William Beard" <wabeard6596@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:4C64FE7F-5D4C-4DB9-A8C5-FD3B3D70D312@microsoft.com...
>> Back in the hay day of PCs, Norton's Disk Test would test for bad sectors
>> and, if found, would mark them as bad so Windows would not use them. The
>> Norton test requirements were more stringent than Windows so any sector
>> that passed Norton's test would pass Windows requirements. Is there a
>> Vista supported product on the market today that will do this? All the
>> adverts talk about data recovery. I'm more interested in fault
>> prevention. Where is Peter Norton when you need him (no offense
>> Symantec). Thanks...
>>
>
>