Re: scandsk using floppy -
in the screenshot I am scanning my hard disk with a 98SE bootdisk - my operating system is XP.
sorry I should of said my XP is NTFS - I forgot about those early XPs circa 2003/04 that had FAT.
I also said this back in my post - "if you've got a floppy drive and want to try, here goes"
No big deal - I dont see everthing myself (as will be revealed, if you check some my previous posts)
btw - the HDD that is being scandsk in the screenshot is a SATA hard disk (160GB) and there is another SATA on computer as second HDD (500GB for multimedia files) which I can also scandsk by simply changing directory from C: to E: (on the floppy) and in not distant future there will be RAID array running to a third HDD (200GB I hope), which will be there to differential backup for the first HDD, which will be system drive and control center for my internet usage. I dont use Linux systems so this best Windows setup I can devise on my limited expense account (for a standalone machine - I also have networked computers setup as well, which I don't use yet because I'm wait until I change my ISP contract later this year).
Scandisk was in common usage 10 years ago and IMHO is the prefect way to check hard disks for errors as you do yr scan in MS-DOS and the test results are final - even small bad must show up in the test. I have always felt this was not the case with chkdsk, which simply verifies files, indexes and security descriptors.
I used scandsk a lot in old days when hard disks were usual small - 8GB, 10GB, 20Gb etc
- often you had to throw the HDD out after the computer had a virus - I used to do this, red spots was final
But Billkwando, you now find that you have RAID array - which almost certain will not be turned on (I wont say go to setup and check because I'm nearly outta this thread) - so you probably simply have two HDD storage devices running on yr computer
Are they both IDE? - I guess they must be as you havent said they were SATA.
Are they set up master and slave or are they both master disks? - because it is often the case that you also have an OS on yr second hard disk (but not necessarily). But careful because even if second HDD has an OS on it, it may not be configured to run on that particular motherboard.
But you should be right over at geeks to go anyways.
Alternative option before I bail out - un-hook yr hard disks and just set up yr new 500GB with its operating system and bring it up to date through Microsoft update service (I assume you going to run Windows). Then one at a time you can run yr old hard disks underneath yr new setup either as secondary drive or as slave drive, and you can simply copy what content you want from old HDDs across to the new 500GB SATA drive. (you may have password problems, reply post back here if that is problem).
You will also have to re-install all yr programs, devices and drivers onto the new 500GB HDD. Then once you good to go wit new system, just copy yr content across. If you can see all yr old drives on yr TestDisk, then there should be no problem. You should also be able to see them from yr new SATA system.
Edit - oh I see, broken PC is SATA - check if that is that both HDDs on the PC