The Energon Pub

I thought there was already a topic for discussing computer problems and getting help, but it's not showing up in a search. In fact nothing is showing up in a search.

Anyways here are a few problems I've been having. Any help would be appreciated.

1. I'm stuck with Win98se for the time being. That's not really a big source of problems, although my computer is outdated (last upgraded in 2001). The problem is I can't format one of my hard drvies back into FAT32 in order to back up data. That was the failed result of installing Win2k on the HDD. It had formatted the drive in NTFS or whatever it's called, and I haven't been able to "see" the hard drive in Win98 since. I've tried booting up with a Win98 startup disk in order to format the drive, but it can't "see" the drive either. I made sure I disconnected everything but that HDD before booting up with the disk, but still, nothing. Is there a utility that will allow me to convert the drive back to FAT32 from a bootable CD or floppy? The Western Digital bootable CD doesn't seem to help much either, except by writing all 0s to the drive (which I've already done).

2. I have a 60 GB drive with bad sectors on it. I had formatted it and run Norton Disk Doctor on it so that the sectors are all "marked" or whatever. It looks like a chocolate chip cookie in the surface scan display. So this might be a really stupid question, but I'm going to ask anyway: is it alright to use the drive to store data, even though it's rife with bad sectors? I mean, will Windows know that there's a bad sector so it should skip that area of the drive as it's writing to it? I hate to even think about using this drive. And I hate Maxtor, which is the drive's brand...

3. I've been saving up for a complete overhaul of my computer. I build my own computers, ever since my first one around 1998 or so. Unfortunately I haven't kept up with computer trends for a long time (2001 or so). Any advice? I always preferred AMD to Intel. I was thinking about going the dual-core processor route. I need a machine that can handle audio editing, and eventually some video editing which is something I've always wanted to do.

Spike wrote:2. I have a 60 GB drive with bad sectors on it. I had formatted it and run Norton Disk Doctor on it so that the sectors are all "marked" or whatever. It looks like a chocolate chip cookie in the surface scan display. So this might be a really stupid question, but I'm going to ask anyway: is it alright to use the drive to store data, even though it's rife with bad sectors? I mean, will Windows know that there's a bad sector so it should skip that area of the drive as it's writing to it? I hate to even think about using this drive. And I hate Maxtor, which is the drive's brand...

If it's marked as a bad sector no OS will attempt to write to it.

Is it safe to use? No. The drive is starting to fail, plain and simple. Sure, no more sectors may fail and it could keep going for a number of years, but if you want to take that risk with your data on a drive that's clearly defective that's your call. I wouldn't though.

Spike wrote:1. I'm stuck with Win98se for the time being.

Why? I say back up what you can and get XP. It might just see the drive. You're not stuck with 98 in this day and age. You must not be looking hard enough.

You're gonna want it for your new machine anyway. Vista what?

Spike wrote:3. I've been saving up for a complete overhaul of my computer. I build my own computers, ever since my first one around 1998 or so. Unfortunately I haven't kept up with computer trends for a long time (2001 or so). Any advice? I always preferred AMD to Intel. I was thinking about going the dual-core processor route. I need a machine that can handle audio editing, and eventually some video editing which is something I've always wanted to do.

I too am looking to make a new machine, and I too will be doing video editing, and CG animation. Don't give two shits about gaming, so it's hard to find something optimized for what I want.

I have always preferred intel to AMD and I have my eye on the Core2 Quad. Five hundred bananas. I don't know what AMD's equivalent is, but I'd advise you to start there and get the specs from it.

ATX motherboards seem to be the standard these days. Don't remember what it was when I made this computer (2000).

PCI Express is something you want. It's the new AGP. DVI is the new video jack for monitors and such, but I'm going with something that also has the old blue (VGA?) plug.

SATA ready stuff is a must. IDE cables are officially over, thank God. I say that's about 10 years too late. Everything you get must be SATA ready.


That's all I can think of for now. I'm still educating myself on all this stuff.

Before you do anything, get Wipedrive. (http://www.wipedrive.com/)

It will format and clean the entire drive, back to the factory original settings before anything was ever installed on it.

Oh and the bad sector thing, give WD a shot before throwing in the towel on this one.

I used WD on my girlfriend's HD which said it had failed and wouldn't load any OS (we tried 98SE, ME, and XP Home w/ SP2) so I figured I might as well try everything. Wiped the drive, and guess what? The error went away and her drive reported normally. Called HP and found out that while it was loading (start up) and the power died out that it caused a fatal error in Windows. That it was a software based problem, not a hardware problem, and they were correct.

Give it a shot before doing anything drastic.

Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I wasn't so sure about the bad-sectored HDD, I just thought that maybe it would be fine other than the bad sectors. I didn't use the drive a lot, and I wonder how it got bad sectors. It turned me off from buying Maxtor ever again, though. That and another Maxtor drive that I had problems with...

About XP... yeah, I just never upgraded because I've managed so far with Win98se with little problems. It's only been in the past year or so that Quicktime wouldn't let me see related files made to work in the most recent QT player, that kind of stuff. But then I would find some way to make things work, and just never bothered with XP. Now it's just a matter of buying it or, ahem, buccaneering it. I think I can get a full version of XP for about $90 online. Yikes. It would be the first OS that I've bought

I read a bit about SATA vs PATA (IDE) a few months ago. I want to switch over to SATA, but since I still have some IDE devices that I'd like to hang on to, I can just use my Ultra ATA card with my new system. If that would work. I would need a regular PCI slot, though.

Do they have DVD burners in SATA? Is it overkill for a DVD burner to utilize SATA? I seem to recall my bootup screen saying that my DVD-ROM and CD burner were ATA 66 or 33... not even 100 or 133. Neither one are that old (in fact the newest things in my box).

That brings up another question: what's the difference between DVD+R and DVD-R? One is better than the other, if I heard my brother right...

No real difference, just a slightly different aproach to the same problem. As far as I was aware, most pc dvd writers/rewriters were dvd+- (ie they could use both).