Bad sectors found with scandisk.

[ddeder]

I just ran scandisk on a computer running Windows 98. Just over 65000 bytes were found in bad sectors. I have a couple of questions:

Can this data be recovered without special utilities?
Can the bad sector(s) be repaired?
Is it likely that this means that this harddrive is on the way out?

 

[Hessakia]

harddrive is prolly dying... scandisk saved all the info it could from those sectors already, repair is out of the question.

 

[Mitzi]

Can this data be recovered without special utilities?

Not really, but chances are the data on the damaged area will not be personal files anyway (we are only taking about 65Kb of information here!).

Can the bad sector(s) be repaired?

No, but you can tell scandisk to repair the errors which really marks them as bad sectors and thus prevents the hard drive from writing to the damaged sectors in the future. There is no way to fix, a bad sector (as in making a bad sector good).

Is it likely that this means that this harddrive is on the way out?

Possibly. First off do a full surface scan and tell Scandisk to repair any errors its finds. Just do a full surface scan of hard drive about once a week for the next few weeks, if more and more bad sectors keep appearing then your hard drive is failing. However, it is possible that these bad sectors have always been there and there is nothing wrong with your drive.