At 07:53 PM 2/23/2005 -0500, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>Just as with tape, magnetic disc manufacturing has evolved considerably in
>the last fifteen years.
>
>About five years ago a friend gave me a ten year old IBM PS2 computer which
>he had never used. I tried it and it would boot up but found many HD read
>errors. I reformatted the drive. About half the disc space was marked
>unusable but
>I was able to use the rest.
>
>A couple of months I fired it up again. It would not boot from the HD. I
>haven't tried another reformat yet, though I intend to since it is the only
>working machine I have which will read some IBM BASIC binary files that I
>would like
>to retrieve (after they are transferred from 5-1/2 floppies that it won't
>read).
>
>However this is all "ancient" computer technology, in the same category that
>all we are using today will be 20 years from now.
>
>Mike Csontos

This is the sort of task to turn over to Spinrite from
   http://grc.com/
The program is designed to do only one thing: maintain platter integrity
(including recovering sectors as possible). At a guess, the disc and its
data are not worth the cost of the program, but anyone using hard drives in
critical applications (or for archival storage) would do well to check it out.


Mike
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http://www.mrichter.com/