i don't know whether it's normal or not, but it's a little relieving to realize that 3% means 30%, 4% means 40%, etc. seems like a bug in the program.

so, i'm at a little over 40% after 18 hours, indicating it should be done by this time tomorrow.

well, the first pass anyways.

of the first partition. i'm really hoping i don't need to do this for the second partition. it's roughly 10x the size. yeah. but size isn't the only factor. in fact, i'll try a reinstall before i do it. i'm kind of still hoping it's just the boot sector.

it's kind of got me wondering if i should defrag the fucker from time to time. the conventional wisdom is not to defrag large drives. but is a 50 gb partition that big?

there were a lot of errors at the front of the mft, but now i'm going 10-20K sectors between problems.

see, it never told me it couldn't find a hard drive, or there wasn't an os. the hard drive test failed, but that's not the same thing as "no hd" or "no os". it bootstrapped itself into a 100 MB startup utility partition - on the hd. yet, it couldn't find the boot database thing (whatever it is now, i should know this, i went over it in vista support training, but in practice all i ever had to tell anybody was to run the utility, which i can't get to start because i can't read the partition). that says dead partition, meaning dead database shit, not dead disc.

i just can't parse randomly dying drives. but i've seen mbrs evaporate.

it hit a rough spot around when i fell asleep this afternoon and may even still be in it. its still hard to say if its salvageable, but the damage report is going to be bad. upwards of 5% of the partition, even, maybe.

it's a big drive. as mentioned, i could halve it and still have too much space. but that indicates imminent mass failure.