scan disk 2983

Actually on checking with my friend GOOGLE I see that if you are still using an OS that is sat on top of DOS (i.e. WIN9X or WINME) you can tell scan disk to check the read-write times and report slow areas (I guess ones where retries occur) of the disk , so perhaps I was wrong. However if you are using something based on NT then you don't actually have SCANDISK. There is a drive checking utility, but its not called SCANDISK... I guess that if in general filks beleive that SCANDISK tests the hardware we are drifting into folklore and getting on topic. Odd that things usually go the other way over here...

I don't beleive that the surface scan tests writability. If you have a file system error it will try and write to correct errors, but thats not a test.

I don't think this is tested by any of the PC based "drive test" utiilities I have used recently. I wonder if even the hardware drive testing box for the old IBM3380 drives we used to have on our 4381 tested the area between the tracks? As 3380 could be formatted with a variety of block sizes the gaps between sectors was not "well defined" and I am pretty sure it formatted the tracks enough different sector sizes to cover the whole track.

Dave.