Conner 1GB CFS1081A - Trying to recover allocation unit - issues formatting

[offensive_Jerk]

So I have a P1 computer that has this old 1GB Conner CFS1081A. It would boot to Windows 95 and seemed to work ok, but wanted a fresh install.

I'm trying to restore the computer to factory settings using the restore disks, but when I try to format c: from DOS, it comes up with 'trying to recover allocation unit 604' and the number count goes up. It goes through all that and then eventually formats, but it takes a long time.

This happens even I go into FDISK, delete the partition and then create a new one, and try to reformat. Not really sure what that message means, and googling just leads to a bunch of people speculating what it means.

I ran a spinrite level 4 on it, still happening.

Is there anything I can do, or know of any Conner tools I can use?
Or should I try some type of low level format tools or anything?

 

[Stone]

The drive has bad sectors. It might not be useable. I don't know of any way to successfully do a LLF on an IDE drive. That's always done at the factory.

 

[offensive_Jerk]

Crap.
It does eventually format. I guess I'll go ahead and install Win95 back on and hope it doesn't croak soon.

 

[Stone]

Ususlly, when an IDE drive starts showing bad sectors, it's on its way out. It doesn't show any at first because it has a buffer that replaces bad sectors with good ones. Once that buffer is exhausted any additional bad sectors become visible. So, effectively, once you start seeing bad sectors, there's already quite a few of them.

 

[barythrin]

What the others said. It will mark bad sectors if it can (I actually don't know where.. I guess there's a special character tag in the FAT table for sector X unusable) but when you reformat it will erase those do not write indexes and start over which is what you're probably seeing. You could try doing a scandisk with fix/scan sectors and it might be able to mark them for you again after the format but the drive will likely develop more issues and wouldn't be recommended for usage.

 

[krebizfan]

That drive might be new enough to support SMART (or the precursor Intellisafe). Check the status that SMART displays. If the drive has gone through its spare sectors and has large numbers of bad sectors as well, the drive had probably suffered a severe head crash and bits of busted media are bounding around the platter knocking out ever more of the disk.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Some models of Conner drives seem to be susceptible to this sort progressive degradation--I've certainly had a few. Mostly, they seem to be concentrated in the 620MB-to-1GB area in my experience. Perhaps a badly-implemented coating.

 

[mbbrutman]

It's time for a new drive ...

The one is quite old - I bought my first 1 GB sized drive in 1994, and I'm sure that one is not too much newer. The mechanicals age and wear out and there is no low-level format possible on a drive of that capacity. (It is using either embedded servo information or dedicated servo tracks; both are written at the factory and can not be re-rewritten by end users.) And that assumes that the drive has not been knocked around.

You can easily get drives up to 8GB that should work in that machine without too much drama.