How do you fix clusters and sectors?

I changed one of my NTFS partitions on a secondary physical drive to a FAT partition for a special purpose. I kept it well below the FAT 2-gig limit. The new FAT formatted drive seemed okay, but when I tried to copy files to it, I started getting "Sector Not Found Writing Drive X", after a few hundred files were copied. Then the file structure seemed to be trashed and I couldn't do anything more. It had lost clusters and cross-linked files and trashed file names. I reformatted the drive again and it seemed clean and okay, but the same problem occurred again. "Sector not found" USUALLY means that the drive is bad or has some bad spots, but as far as I know there is nothing physically wrong and when I converted back to an NTFS drive, Norton Disk Doctor did not find any problem. The drive works okay with NTFS. Could I be running into some other DOS limits that this physical drive can’t handle, due to the number of sectors and cylinders it contains? Also wondered why the format program did not ask for FAT-16 or FAT-32. It only gave a choice of FAT or NTFS. Perhaps NT 4.0 came out before FAT-32? I am assuming that the drive was formatted with the original FAT-16.

Unfortunately I must keep this a Windows NT machine with a DOS boot option.

This question was answered on June 16, 2004. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

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You might want to try Flashing the BIOS by starting your computer and presing pause break and checking the version of BIOS you have so that you can go to the website of the company and download the program you need for that BIOS so you can flash it,(be very carefull when falshing your BIOS it can destroy your motherboard ) as one solution or you can run a Defragment or check disk to check bad clusters and missing sectors You can do so by running programs from your start button go to accessories, from there go to system tools and you will see it from there Good luck

Eduardo Williams

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Posted by Student of Katharine Gibbs School - New York on June 16, 2004

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