Geek lessons

One of the nifty things about playing with computers is that, unlike writing a Ph.D. dissertation, just a few keystrokes can set in motion something that will run by itself the rest of the evening.

Over the last few nights, I've been trying to run Win98's ScanDisk to check the disk surface for errors. My main goal has been to suss out whether there's something physically wrong with the primary HD of the machine that won't play nice with the Linux Live CDs. (A bad HD has been suggested by nearly all of the nice computer friends I e-mailed for adavice.) But, for comparison, I've also run ScanDisk on my other machine.


A few observations:

• Even in Safe Mode, both my machines would occasionally start the process over, stating that some other program would start up (thus, presumably, changing the content of the disk). My understanding is that Safe Mode is supposed to protect from this. Weird.
  
• My 900MHz machine (my ''good'' PC) was processing around 1.4x the number of sectors per minute as my 1.7GHz machine (the ''potentially bad HD'' PC). Thus, whatever relevant bus speeds aside, the machine with a 1.9x faster processor was performing an identical task more slowly. Although the faster machine was a disk partition, whereas the slower machine was an entire physical drive; maybe that's easier to scan.
  
• Old Roomate suggested I do the disk scan thru the DOS command line, rather than the Windows route. I did this, and what would take from early evening until somewhere in the wee hours (where it would then jam up) now whipped thru in about three hours.
• ...And I prefer the DOS-based interface. Shows more information. Comparison pics below.
  

Windows-based ScanDisk: Simple bar chart; numbers advance in huge chunks


DOS-based ScanDisk: Shows two-dimensionally the progress;
shows block numbers whizzing by


Ya learn something every day.

Oh: The hard drive in question came through with flying colors: No damage indicated. Although the choices on the screen, that I should be able to Tab thru, don't work -- the computer didn't react to any keyboard presses after it had finished.

And upon rebooting, it doesn't recognize the keyboard. Hm...


--GG