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HD w/ Bad sectors...what to do...

T

Tanner

Diamond Member
so, I got this HD...it's got some bad sectors on it. It's gone right? TOTALLY hosed? Nothing I can do about that, right?

Thanks Ahead of Time

God Bless
Tanner
 
Bad sectors do not mean the end of the hard drive... although bad sectors are fairly un-common today they were not at all uncommon 6-10 years ago.

Discs can run indefinitely with bad sectors... a common reason that you would have bad sectors is that your hard drive suffers from a brown out condition... many older hard drives did not do an adquate job of parking the heads when a brown out situation occurred... the capacitor that is designed to park the heads in the event of a power outtage could not compensate fast enough for a low voltage (brownout) condition and so you ended up with heads that banged into the platters... the result would be some bad sectors.

If the number of bad sectors does not increase and the drive shows no other signs of distress (noises of a bearing going out, etc) then I would say that the drive could easily last for several years.
 
Oh yeah, something else that I should add... most newer drives will actually mark off the bad sectors internally and not permit them to be written to. This means that your bad sectors have zero affect on the operating system... basically windows (or whatever OS) will not be allowed to read or write those areas of the disk.
 
you can fix the sectors by running scan disk, and selecting a "THOROUGH" scan. this should hopfully fix it, and if it does not it might propt you to rescan when you restart you computer.... this is what happen to me. let me know if you dont know how to run scan disk.
 
Yeah. A thorough run of Scandisk only marks the bad sectors of the drive so that they are no longer being used. It does not repair the damaged area of the disk. If the head runs over these bad sectors it may cause the head to 'drag' creating more bad sectors on the disk so it's best to mark all the bad sectors on your drive.
 
so, since this HD is like 2 years old...do U think that it exiles those bad sectors? Or ya think that this thing will just let 'em go?
 
not sure what you mean.

as indicated, scandisk merely marks the sectors as bad so that the OS won't use them. It does this by editing the file allocation table so that the operating system knows not to go to those specific locations on the disk. Newer disk drives actually create their own internal tables of bad sectors which locks those sectors and absolutely prevents the disk from accessing them which prevents the problem that Jedi mentioned with causing more sectors to go bad by accessing a damaged area of the disc.
 
gunf1ghter


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that's hilarious! 😀 I love it! What a skit, eh? 😀

Goose77, DJediMaster, gunf1ghter Thanks for all your help! 😀
I think that I'm going to run that through scandisk, and hoe for the best w/ it... 😉

God Bless
Tanner
 
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