Bad Sectors on Hard Drive

[JRW160]

I have bad sectors on my secondary hard drive. When I run a full surface scandisk in both Windows and DOS, it will scan through the sectors until it gets to the bad ones, and then the computer will freeze up. What do I need to do? When I try to boot up the computer, it immediately goes to scandisk and will run throught just the general scan. If I exit scandisk, the computer boots up fine. If I let it run through, it tries to boot up and then tells me BIOS is not installed and then says Operating System not found. Do I need a better scandisk utility than the ones that come with Windows 98?

 

[DAM]

what you need to do is set those two bad sectors aside, any hd utility will do this, but try to find one by the maker of your hd, run the util and let it take care of the errors.




dam()

 

[JRW160]

I downloaded the Western Digital HD utility and tried to run it, but my computer locked up. I tried to restart and it wouldn't recognize the secondary hard drive anymore. I tried to boot numerous times, and it wouldn't boot up. It wouldn't even boot to bios. I then disconnected the secondary hard drive, and it booted up ok. Has the secondary drive gone bad?

 

[JRW160]

i just tried to put the hard drive as the secondary on another computer, and that computer won't boot with it installed either. I installed it, and the computer doesn't auto detect it right off, I have to go into bios to get it to autodetect. After exiting bios, the computer then starts up Windows XP and the status screen comes up, but then it goes to a black screen. Without this hard drive installed, the computer runs fine. I have no idea what to do. This seemingly faulty drive has some stuff I would like to keep on it.

 

[HappyPuppy]

Oh. Windows XP.

 

[pamf]

did these bad sectors just appear recently? if so back up whatever you can and try to get an rma if the drive is under warranty. if wd's diagnostic util locks up when running theres a good chance they'll approve it ..

if you still cant get the drive to be visible, try hooking it up as primary master (take the other hd out) and use a bootdisk .. if that works, run the diagnostic util .. call up wd if it says the drives screwed, and even if it doesnt.. heh .. if auto detect doesnt workyou could try entering the drives parameters manually..

if you cant get it visible at all you're probably screwed as far as getting your files goes. ;/

bad sectors usually spread in my experience. i had a quantum 6gb go from a few bad sectors to over a gb of them and then straight death in a few weeks
i could see nice *rings* on the platters when i opened it up to mount on my wall.

i never liked quantum anyhow