What to do? Hard drive has a bad block.

[sandmanwake]

My computer has fresh copy of Windows 2000 and everything. Last time I had to format because it was acting funny. It's starting to act funny again. Window's event viewer says that a bad block has been detected on my hard drive. Is there anything I can do?

 

[gentobu]

RMA it if you can.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Won't chkdsk in w2k block it off so it won't be used? BTW, what brand HDD? It's not the Deathstar is it?

 

[bozo1]

Bad blocks are normal and occur over time. All drives have bad blocks. They are mapped out at the factory so you just don't see them. Over time, more occasionally appear and that is normal. Manufacturers will not RMA the drive until the number of bad sectors reach a certain point.

CHKDSK /R will find them and map them out so Windows knows not to write to that sector.
The drive testing software from your manufacturer will map them out on the drive itself so that the OS doesn't even see them (and can't write to that area of the disk), but that will wipe your data - you'll have to reinstall W2K after running that.

 

[sandmanwake]

It's a Western Digital 5400 30Gig drive. I got it a couple months ago and didn't have a chance to use it till fairly recently, so for all practical purposes, it's a brand new drive for me.

Right now, I've got the drive set up so that C is a 12 gig partition and D is a 16 gig logical partition. (Yeah, I know, what happened to the other 2 gigs? I have no idea.) Both partitions are ntfs. chkdsk runs fine on C, but won't run on D. When I try to run it on D, I get a message saying that chkdisk was unable to read the security descriptor datastream.

 

[bozo1]

Since it sounds like a recent install, I'd run Western Digitals diagnostic utility (Data Lifeguard) and let it recertify the drive. It'll map out any bad spots and then you can just reinstall your OS.