how to patch hard disk?

[hulkMAD]

i encountered a problem before where my formatted hard disk was scratched or something, so i had to run a full hard disk check to patch up the messed up areas (might have been through the win98 boot disk). it took a few hours to finish. i totally forgot what program i used and how to do this. im going to format my hard drive and i dont want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how i fixed this problem before. the question is: how do i patch up a formatted hard disk?

windows 2000 pro
tyan trinity kt-a mobo w/ 1 GHZ T-bird
seagate barracuda (?) 40 GB hard disk

[DoctorReno]

If your HD was "scratched" it would be toast and need to go to the garbage.
You probably ran something like scandisk in thourough mode and that can take a LONG time.
If your drive is developing a lot of bad sectors it may meen it on the way out.
When you install your OS, 2000 you will format the drive and it will automatically run scandisk and if basically everything is fine on the drive it will continue with the installation.

Sometimes it is useful to first do a zero fill format of the drive to write all sectors with zeros. this "resets" all the sectors that were previously identified as bad and lets scandisk check them again. Sometimes if the drive is not truely bad or dying it puts new life into the driveby recovering sectors that were previously flagged as bad.