Subject: Is SMARTDRV.EXE causing bad sectors on my hd?
From: jdriver@netlink.cts.com (John Driver)

        I am having something very unusual happen.  First 
some background on my system.  I have a Mitsubishi 63 meg Hard Drive, 
and am running Smartdrv (the version that comes with Windows 3.1) on 
it.  I rarely use Windows.  I use a program called Disk Technician 
Gold v1.14 to do diagnostics live time on my hard drive.  It works by 
having a device driver detect whenever more than one read is 
necessary for a file, or if there is anything else is wrong with it, 
and minor problems are fully checked out upon rebooting.  My hard 
drive is notorious for bad sectors.  I usually end up with 8 new bad 
sectors a week.
 
        Here's what happened:  I ran a program, and DTG broke in with 
an Emergency Warning and recommended I reboot.  It gave me this 
message twice before the program was fully loaded.  I exited the program 
and did just this.  DTG went through its bootup process, examining 
for new errors etc., and a screen popped up and said something about 
sectors for a brief period of time.
 
        I then went back to the program, executed it again, and the 
exact same error was detected.  I rebooted and tried again, and the 
same error happened again.  So, I removed DTG from memory, and went 
to the program to see if I could detect anything wrong.  Sure enough 
there was a number of read attempts.  So I rebooted and reloaded DTG, 
but removed the cache.  I executed the program.  No read errors, 
either audible or detected by DTG.  I quit the program, loaded the 
cache, and ran the program again.  The errors were detected.
 
        Ok, so the errors are there, and DTG detects but doesn't fix 
them, when the cache is loaded.  When the cache is not loaded there are 
no errors.  So, to see if the cache was interfering with any other 
files, I went into xtree gold and tagged all files, and searched them 
for a random string (in other words, I wanted the program to 
completely read every file on my hard drive).  Before I got through 
the c's DTG had detected at least six errors and recommended I reboot.
 
        Does anybody, have any idea why Smartdrv is causing misreads on 
my hard drive?  Oh, there are exactly two misreads per file, and 1 in 
about every 100 files are affected.  
 
        I originally posted this message to Disk Technician Corp.'s 
system, but I figured someone out in netland may know enough about 
smartdrv to help me out.

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