How/Why did my hard drive develop bad sectors?

[shawnmos]

My Western Digital 4GB has all these bad sectors and it is unusable now! All I did was try to install Win2k and while it was formating the NTFS partition it froze with the HD light on. I left it like that for a long time(thinking it was still reading) and I finally relised that it was frozen so I pressed reset. Now my hard drive has bad sectors and is unusable. It stops at 59%(the same spot it froze) when I try to reformat it for NTFS or FAT32. The only way I could even get it to format was to use the EZ-INSTALL utility. I ran scandisk on it at 8:00 this morning and it is still running. It is currently at 7980 bad clusters and counting. Damn it's slow!!! It still at 59% and has been running for 12hours now (It's been at 59% for 11.5 hours with all the bad sectors). Anyway why did this happen? WD is going to replace it for free thank God!!

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

first of all, I don't know any place but cheap auctions/sales/giveaways that sell something as small as a 4Gig. That tells me that the 4Gig is old. Old things, like HDD's and diskettes go bad. I don't know why they go bad, but they do. Maybe the plastic gets a bit too dried out or something. Just save up and get another one for cheap.

WD's got a 15.3Gig going for $119.50, while Maxtor has a 20.4 going for $117.


When a disk starts going bad, it's bound to keep getting worse. I'm suprised that you're still trying to use it. More than likely, even if you get it fully installed and boot it properly, it will most likely crash all too often --if it boots at all.

 

[rbV5]

Use a low level format utility and start over.

OOPS, I didn't see where you were getting a new drive from WD...nevermind.

 

[shawnmos]

I tried and it wouldn't work. It had an error when writing to the drive.

 

[shawnmos]

What I want to know is why was it working flawlessly and then suddently died(well basicaly).

 

[ax57]

One way that it can happen is to bump or jar the hard drive while it is operating. The head can crash into the platter and do physical damage which results in bad sectors. Other times they just fail for no apparent reason.

ax57

 

[corkyg]

There are several causes of bad sectors.

1. Voltage spikes.

2. A physical bump of the drive while running.

3. And the mysterious malady called "bit rot." Happens when the magnetic media gets old.

 

[Mday]

ewwwwww bit rot ewwwwwwwww

get a new drive.

repeat

ewwwwww bit rot ewwwwwwwww

get a new drive.

repeat

see above.

 

[Gunbuster]

People allways ask that about computers in for repair

Person: It (insert any part) went bad? How did it go bad?

Me: I dont know, it just did

Person: But whats wrong with it?

Me: The (whatever) is bad

Person: Why did it go bad?

Me: It hates you

Repeat..................................

 

[Hanpan]

Even a single smoke particle between he heads and the media can cause bad sectors. So be careful were you smoke

 

[busterbrown]

Have you tried running Spinrite on it? That will tell you what's going on and whether you really have bad sectors. You can get Spinrite at www.spinrite.com. That program's a standard that has been around in various versions since the 1980's