[plug] Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!

[Chris Caston]

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 12:48, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Bloody Windows 95!
> 
> I have a "Spare" machine that gets used as my general workhorse. It has a 40GB drive with a 20GB 
> Linux Partition on it.
> I decided I needed a small Win95 and Win2000 Partition to do some software testing, so I used the 
> DOS based Fdisk to create the additional partitions. It asked all the right questions and appeared 
> to do all the right things. Formated and installed fine.
> 
> Back in Linux I started to get ext3 errors, so I fired up Linux fdisk to find that DOS had created 
> the Win95 partition starting right in the middle of my Linux partition!.
> 
> Bugger.
> 
> The other bastard is this machine has no internal Floppy or CDROM, and Windows won't install of a 
> USB connected Cdrom!
> 
> I have had fun getting a USB2 cdrom to work in DOS. It does work 90% of the time though.
> 
> Oh well, re-format and re-install.
> It's been years since I have done a clean Debian install. Perhaps it's time to try out the new 
> installer.
> 
> While I'm here, does anyone know a sure fire way to kill a hard disk that does not involve physical 
> damage? I have a Maxtor Maxline-II 250GB that is slowly growing bad sectors. I can't use it in my 
> RAID as I can't rely on the disk, but it is not yet bad enough to RMA so I need to coax it to get 
> worse in a hurry to be able to RMA the disk. I figured I might just leave my machine on doing 
> constant badblock -n cycles, which should just exercise it to death (that seems to make the bad 
> blocks grow faster anyway). I guess I could cook it, but I just have a problem with doing it that way.
> 
> Frustrated in Dubai.
> Brad

Usually if the manufacturer utility recommends replacing the drive then
they will accept it. Just give them all the error codes.

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