fixing bad sectors on hdd

[zhena]

ok... so i had two hdd's the ibm 75gxp (never will i buy one again) 45gb
and an ibm 14gxp 10gb...

both had some bad sectors..
before sending them for an rma i tried running ibm's dft program.
it said it can restore the sectors... it did. i rescanned them and now every single program says there are no bad sectors.

i assumed that it just removed those sectors from the hdd table. I am not talking about the FAT32 TABLE.
there is an initial table with all the sectors when the hdd goes through a low lever format at the factory.

but i compared the amount of available total space on both hdd's and it was the exact same amount as before.
the same exact number of bytes (compared using partition magic)

so how can this be?
i thought a bad sector is physical bad damage to the surface of the platter.

anybody know whats goin on?
i know it is possible to readjust the way the head reads from the surface by a couple of microns.
is that what happened?

what do u guys think?
if you were to use these hdd's now there is no trace that they ever had bad sectors,
so am i suppose to assume that they are fixed now?

 

[zhena]

up

 

[Souka]

the IBM tool reformats the sectors and tests for readability.

If readable, they're good to go.

If not, it tries again. If still unreadable it marks them as "bad" and continues.



A bad sector can be caused by a number of things, not just physical dammage.


Anyhow, I would ebay those drives ASAP and get yourself a WD 120gb w/8mb cache drive for $148 (check hotdeals forum) or a segate baracuda IV drive. I have a baracuda drive, a tad slower than my old 45gb 60gb IBM drives, but it hasn't failed.....and the segate drive is silent.