Classic British Flight Sim

Hi Bob,

Totally understand on the hard disk, just didn't want you wasting hours installing everything again on a disk that is going to die. Yep, shouldn't be any problem adding a second drive.

Cheers

this is the disk

The reason the entries show in My Computer/Local Disc (C:)/Documents and Settings/BOB/Application Data/Microsoft/FS9/Scenery cfg is because that file was on your "C" drive and was not affected by the problems with your "E" drive. That does not mean that the files exist on "E". Those entries may be pointing to files that no longer exist on "E" drive.

Did you try Check Disk? I know there are other opinions on that but if you were going to reformat anyway, you had nothing to loose.

At this point, I would not trust your "E" drive at all. It maybe just a few bad blocks or it maybe many. If you run Check Disk and select the "Attempt to repair or recover bad blocks" you may find the answer to that. Check Disk should remove those bad blocks from the index of available space on the disk to prevent files being saved to them. A few years ago, I had problems with a program on my "C" drive. I ran CHKDSK and it found and locked out two bad blocks. I have not had any further problems since. Based on how check disk goes, you can make a decision on whether you need a new drive or not. If you have further problems using the "E" drive, I would try to make some room on the "C" drive if need be and run a minimal FS setup from there until you can purchase a new hard drive.

To answer your question, installing a new drive in the same bay as your old one should not affect your "C" drive. The Computer Management Console will allow you to change drive letter assignments if you need to do that, but you should not have to. Of course, we are dealing with Microsoft software here so there is always the element of the unknown.