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Help! Opinion /experience needed! Background: I have a 9 station, 2 server Lantastic network. The computers are 386sx IBM with 40 meg or 80 meg IDE hard drives. They are four years old. Last week, while loading a program, the hard drive made really obnoxious noises and the system crashed but the hard drive continued to make noises. I ran Norton Utilities and did a "disk scan". A "bad cluster" was found and marked. The program (Norton) said that my hard drive was "phyically damaged" and I should back up my files. Yesterday, the technician who repairs our computers told me to format the hard drive and everything would be fine. My experience with IDE hard drives is that when a bad sector shows up more are forthcoming and that the drive is failing. My understanding is that by formatting an IDE drive, one does not actually "mark and set aside" physical bad sectors. I need some opinions on this matter. Matters to consider--The technician only comes once a month to our school. This hard drive is in the computer I use to checkin/out materials so it sees daily, heavy use. I need to decide if I should scream for a new hard drive or spend the time to reformat, etc. Janet Johns bbvschlib@hslc.org