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Please note: A Bad Hard Drive Sector is an indication of physical damage to your drive. This happens eventually with every Hard Drive (though some might effectively last ‘forever’). It is recommended that as soon as you start to get read/write errors, you change Hard Drive. I am not responsible for your loss of data or damage to your drive – you are.
All the operations below will do, is tell your Operating System not to use the damaged area – it does NOT repair the damaged area.
Windows 98, Me, XP (not sure about Vista, but probably the same/similar).
1. Open the My Computer window.
2. Right-click on the Hard Drive you want to scan and select Properties.
3. On the Tools tab of the Properties window, select (under “Error-checking”) click “Check Now…”
4. Check the box beside the “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors” text.
5. Click “Start”.
Mac OS X
Unfortunately it seems that Mac OS does not ship with a suitable Disk Utility for marking bad sectors from within the OS. With the Mac OS I would advise that you copy/backup all of your data and perform a Zero-format on your drive prior to the re-installation of the OS, this appears to be the only time where a Mac Hard Drive sector can be marked as Bad.
You can use Disk Utility to verify whether or not the disk needs repair in Mac OS X (10.5). If it does need repair then you need to start up from the Installation Disc and run Repair Disk in the Disk Utility from there.
They obviously don’t like the idea of repairing the volume that you’re starting from.
Next option is to make a bootable back-up (with such as SuperDuper) and erase and format.
I recommend SuperDuper for making a bootable back-up and it’s Smart Update feature keeps the back-up, up-to-date. In the worst case if the hard drive fails you can work from the back-up drive until replaced.
Thanks John! :)
These days I try to help with the problem in the ‘other’ OS to the one I have the problem in. With this one I used XP, but thought I’d try to add a guide for Mac too.
You ditched Vista? OMG!
heheh, naa. I have a triple-boot of three OS and with VM Ware I still have Windows 98 so I can test things for work. :)
Vista has a few really nice utils, one of which is the photo cataloger – couldn’t do without it now.
Ahh! the power of virtualization! Explains everything. It’ll be Ubuntu next :-)
However it is quite difficult to explain virtual machines. I can’t think of another computer software effect that has people so agog. (Incidentally I think agog is a great name for a best of web site – probably wouldn’t translate in american eng though)!
I don’t know if you have it in PC (though there is bound to be some software to emulate it) but Mac OS X – 10.5 has ‘Spaces’ – which I like – basically multiple desktops for the same user, configurable in quantity though 4 is typical and great for having a VM full screen in one of them, another for iTunes maybe, one for web/email apps and one for work say – just ctr + tab between them. It’s cool!
Yeah I tried VM on the Mac OS (10.4.8 I think) and it’s really quite impressive. Being able to go without spending hundreds on pieces of software you already own for one platform is reason enough to buy VM software.
I’m not aware of anything you can alt-tab between, but you can always right click on a shortcut and select ‘run as different user’ on Windows, then any settings saved for that program might get saved into a different documents and settings folder.
Sorry I mean ctrl + arrow keys!
Like this link if it works?
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=c7MHup6kXbU
You could run several Virtual Machines and give each one a “Space” (or in other words its own desktop, full screen if you like) and ctrl + arrow to make it the current visible desktop.
Hm, very interesting! What about background resources? Does it ‘hibernate’ the spaces not in the foreground? I’d probably hate for my computer to get bogged down by something I’m not even using right now…
Any ideas on how it works with that?
Well I’m only familiar with how ‘Spaces’ runs in Mac OS X (there is PC software which runs a similar effect I believe) and I use Parallels to create my Virtual Machine to run XP.
In that context, (and I also think Macs are particularly clean at protecting and allocating memory) whilst I typically have a lot of apps running and maybe the VM too, ‘Spaces’ is just ‘organising’ what’s already there.
But, depending on the duration, if I’m not delving into the VM for a while then I will either ‘Pause’ or ‘Suspend’ as I would maybe close “other” Apps not in use.
Pause/Suspend is a feature of Parallels I really appreciate and I would say I never actually shut down XP and it only takes a few seconds to start up from that state.
Yeah I really understand what you mean, I do the same with my virtual machines and I never really restart Windows XP because it takes waaay too long to perform it’s startup routines.
Did you know that Mac OS runs really well in a VM on a PC? It’s funny because the virtual Mac runs almost as well on tasks as the physical XP installation the VM is running off!
Mac OS X in a VM – got to be illegal!!! :-0
Moot point actually, I think Virtual Machines really are futuristic in concept and as Apple likes to push at frontiers with their OS, shouldn’t they allow its use in VMs?
Anyhoo, Happy Anniversary!
Development versions are legal on any type of installation, everything else (as far as I am aware) is illegal.
Mac OS X is essentially a modified Linux anyway, there’s a lot of Linux mods that give an almost Mac-like UI.
Aaaagh! Unix, not Linux – that’s derived from Unix as well.
Mac OS X is distantly based upon the Mach kernal from the BSD version of Unix via NeXT’s NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP OS’s amalgamated with Apples previous development work on a successor to the classic Mac OS; when Apple bought NeXT. Anyhoo, BSD is kind of parallel to Linux.
Mac OS X 10.5 version has ‘just’ gained full Unix certification, making it the most popular Unix OS by far. As you point out this infers more commonality for developers.
The only interesting or relevant thing to this thread is that OPENSTEP was designed to be platform portable, and also with respect to VM’s I think true portability is still out there in the future!
For the average PC user like me – all that stuff sounds the same and works very similar. ;) More seasoned users will know the difference a lot more.
Anyhoo! On a synergy-like theme have you evaluated CrossOver?
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/videos/
Yeah I did. :) Infact before a Mac version of EVE-Online was released I used to play it using that. :D
Excellent software, saves a lot of money for people I guess not having to buy both PC and Mac versions of the same software.