Yah I just let small amounts of randoms accumulate over long periods without worrying, if they cluster though, that's a surface damage indication, and if I desperately need to keep using that disk I will partition them out. I probably should re-install, but cannot be bothered for the few games I currently use it for (MTG Shandalar and Ascendancy, none of which like the XP side of my hdd much. But after a couple of reeboots it works fine, and the extra processes are not there in taskmanager anymore. PS: and booting win98 often takes a couple or more tries these last 10 years, as it seems to hang at desktop, with an extra number of identically named 'svchost' processes. Not sure if 32 sectors is regarded as many(?), but disk appears to work just as before I think. And has been stable like that (no increase) for a couple of years now. Now, after more than 20 years of weekly/bi-weekly use, the 'bad' disk has then slowly/incrementally amassed a total of 20 reallocaton 'events', which consists of 32 actually reallocated sectors.

The second (data)disk was totally fine (and still is!). I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall their serial numbers were quite close, and was bought together in 1 order.Īfter many years(10-12?), the first disk, with all C:/ drives on it (dual boot Win98/XP) started to show some reallocated sectors. Also, he drops mage robes (neutral archmage I think), and a bunch of higher level scrolls for BG1 (Greater Malison, Otiluke's Resilient Sphere, Stoneskin, Spirit Armor, Remove Curse, Emotion, Feeblemind).Įdit: Stoneskin was from the last guy in the prison Shandalar sent the party to, so you can get it without killing him.Random anecdotal example from my dealings with old spinners:īought 2 identical models summer of 2002, 2x 80GB WesterDigital PATA drives, for my newly built Pentium4 machine. Now to be fair, I did suffer a 6 point drop in reputation, but that's okay since I have Kagain and Edwin in my current party, so I don't want my rep too high. Now this was a tough fight which took several reloads and a successful hit with the wand of paralyzation, but Wow! 26,000 XP for the kill!Īs I said, nothing against the guy but 500 XP vs.

Okay, so then I reloaded to right before giving him the cloak and instead attacked him just to see what the alternative was. Nothing against the guy, seemed like a lovely fellow in fact, and I did fetch his cloak, gave it back to him and got 500 XP. Shandalar is the mage you meet at Ulgoth's Beard who can teleport you to an ice prison place to fetch his cloak.

Shandalar mac