Printable View
I had several bad sectors myself. Now I too believe as AciDriveHB said, something physicaly wrong with the drive.
However I repartitioned my drive, and the bad sectors apreared to disapear. Weather they were realy physical damage or a glitch I dont know. Just that scandisk does not report bad sectors anymore. this may be a good thing or bad, but thought I would mention what I did.
JohnHACK,
One of the best thing you can do is going to your hard drive manufacturer's web site and download the specific tool for your HD.
You can find a tool for your's (Seagate) clicking HERE
Take care,
DKRR
Occasunaly drives ship with bad sectors, and if you are unlucky during a hard reset while the disk is being accessed it can get a physical bad sector. Scandisks flags these sectors and so after that they are ignored. If you keep devloping bad sectors you may have a serious problem, you may have a bad HD, or their are a few viri that hid in bad sectors.Quote:
Originally posted here by journy101
I had several bad sectors myself. Now I too believe as AciDriveHB said, something physicaly wrong with the drive.
However I repartitioned my drive, and the bad sectors apreared to disapear. Weather they were realy physical damage or a glitch I dont know. Just that scandisk does not report bad sectors anymore. this may be a good thing or bad, but thought I would mention what I did.
Also whenever scan disk finds these bad sectors, the information is saved in the partition table (as was explained to me years ago). So something to note if you delete your partition table for that drive, it will "forget" where the bad sectors are. Which can cause problems if you are installing an OS, or even jus trying to format the drive.
Something to keep in mind when formatting a drive with bad sectors...
Just a thought...
~AciD
If ur system is that slow and the scandisk takes a long time to run just let it run to completion. maybe leave it running connected to a power supply overnight and it should be done the next morning. The scan disk will map out the bad sectors and it will prevent these areas from being used again.
If it isnt then u have a major problem and I suggest trying to salvage whatever important info you have and replacing the hard drive. Contrary to what some people might say, it isnt that difficult to replace a hard drive on the notebook. If it really reaches that point, you can PM me and I'll be willing to guide you through replacing the hard drive. All I need would be the notebook model and the sixe of the drive. If its IBM, Toshiba & Dell, I am quite familiar with these notebooks.
OK Thanks... I'll try what u all said...
Wow I didnt realise Scandisk could be so involving.
Check these out
This one talks about what makes a bad cluster
And this one is the index page
Happy scandisking!! :airoff:
Also if you do reformat your pc and you still have bad clusters download this http://www.ariolic.com/download/activesmart.zip its a bit of kit called active S.M.A.R.T it'll tell you if your hard drives broken or about to break or if its using more power than it should etc.
Cheers
V$D$
I have to agree with DKRR on his comment..Quote:
One of the best thing you can do is going to your hard drive manufacturer's web site and download the specific tool for your HD.
I have had a problem similar with Quntam, Western digital, and Seagate drives.. the tools that the manufacturers use lock the bad cluster out in the firmware of the HDD and it will physicly not see the cluster again..even after a format or repartition..
The problem these tools "repair' are as JohnHACK mentioned.. "during Scandisk the system will lock" it will get to 20% or 51% or 96% or 7% whatever.. Also the computer will intermittantly lock.. you will find it is while it is trying to load the same file.. and the only cure is.. Reset or power down..
If the drive is a 1.7Gb (if I remember the thread properly).. some some tools may not apply..but I can be wrong..so still give it a go....
Cheers
"Bad Sectors" don't usually go away. If they are "Bad"; the format program will mark them so the computer never uses them again. If more Bad Sectors show up; it's usually a sign the drive is about to fail (permanently) Can you say 'Backup' ?
Hard Drive Manufacturers usually allow for 5 p/cent bad sectors when shipping.
IDE drives can no longer be 'Low Level' formatted (That is done at the factory)
If the ScanDisk hangs at 51% that's a sign of a damaged file/sector. (as everyone has indicated)
Possibly hit the F8 key after power up; go to Safe Mode then Scandisk (or use a DOS boot disk)
I've never made it through a format with a bad sector, now that I think about it. Because it comes up and says the hard drive may be damaged... well that is in XP at least. Back in the 9x days anytime I would format and install it usually skipped over the bad sectors, then screwed up the installation later because I THINK it was trying to write to those sectors. Pop a new drive in and bam it goes.
And as for a low level format, all it is (again as explained to me) is deleting all your partition tables on your drive, basically making it how it comes from the factory. Which we don't have the option in CMOS anymore, but you can still do it just as easy and recreate the table with fdisk on a Win98 boot disk or using the XP OS installer.
Just a thought...
~AciD