Bad Cluster(s) prevent converting to FAT32
If you have 1 or more bad clusters on your hard drive, Windows
98 will not convert the drive. There are several solutions.
You can modify the registry to have scandisk rescan bad sectors.
See Microsoft's Knowledge Base Article No. Q127055.
Please Note!
A little clarification on the referenced Microsoft's Knowledge
Base Article might be in order. Basically this article say to change
the last digits of a specific registry key value to 04. While
this will work and will cause scandisk to re-check bad clusters
it will also possibly re-set scandisk options you have previously
set.
To prevent this from happening you should add 04 to whatever
your last digits are instead of just changing them to 04.
In my case the last digits are normally 40 because I have
Report MS-DOS mode name length errors enabled in the advanced
options. If I follow the Knowledge Base Article and change the last
digits to 04, the re-check of bad sectors occurs but not
the name length error check because it has been disabled. On the
other hand, if I add 04 to my current 40 and change
the value to 44, then I get both features.
Keep in mind that the 04 change is not permanent, it remains
only until scandisk completes, and you close it. Then a 04
would revert back to 00, and in my case the setting for name
length error checks would be lost until I re-started scandisk and
went into the advanced options and re-enabled it, by changing the
value to 44 instead of 04, then when scandisk completes
the value is reset to 40 instead of 00 and I retain
this setting.
Although this registry hack does reclaim bad clusters, I am not
sure just how good the test really is.
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