Surface Scan

[Leo J Mauler]

On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 14:02:35 -0600 Jonathan Hutchins
<hutchins at tarcanfel.org> writes:
> Strange thing:  My dad was having trouble with a W98 machine, and he 
> ran 
> scandisk with surface scan enabled.  I didn't think that did 
> anything on an 
> IDE drive, but he reports significant improvement in performance.

Surface scan is like the sector tests performed during a format, and it
remaps the hard drive to compensate for any new bad or failing sectors on
the platters.

So if you have a hard drive which is DYING, you will get an increase in
performance if the hard drive partition table knows where bad sectors
are, since before the OS was using bad sectors as if they were good
sectors.

Which is rather the black cloud in his silver lining: if Scandisk plus
surface scan improves overall performance, the hard drive itself is dying
and needs to be replaced soon.

________________________________________________________________
The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand!
Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER!
Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!