Bad clusters on Harddrive?

[Ritter197]

How can I find out whether there are bad clusters on a harddrive?

I used the built-in utilities of Windows XP and see nothing there.

Yet the service man told my daughter, her harddrive had bad clusters which
every now and then gave her a blue screen and said the system has to shut
down.

I have that HD now in my external housing and see nothing bad, but I might
be missing something.

 

[Ted Zieglar aka Rocky]

"How can I find out whether there are bad clusters on a harddrive?"

Open a command prompt (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt)
and type chkdsk c: (if you want to check the C drive), then press Enter on
your keyboard. Look for how many KB are in bad sectors.

If a hard drive continuously develops bad clusters, that's a sign that it
needs to be replaced, and quickly.

First: Backup everything that is important; if you can backup the entire
hard drive, so much the better.

Second: Go to the web site of the manufacturer of the hard drive and obtain
their diagnostic software (it's free.) Run the diagnostic software, and if
it indicates a problem with the hard disk, get it replaced immediately.

Ted Zieglar

 

[Ritter197]

Thank you so much. I found 16 bad clusters.

"How can I find out whether there are bad clusters on a harddrive?"

Open a command prompt (Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt)
and type chkdsk c: (if you want to check the C drive), then press Enter on
your keyboard. Look for how many KB are in bad sectors.

If a hard drive continuously develops bad clusters, that's a sign that it
needs to be replaced, and quickly.

First: Backup everything that is important; if you can backup the entire
hard drive, so much the better.

Second: Go to the web site of the manufacturer of the hard drive and obtain
their diagnostic software (it's free.) Run the diagnostic software, and if
it indicates a problem with the hard disk, get it replaced immediately.

Ted Zieglar

 

[D.Currie]

Thank you so much. I found 16 bad clusters.

Bad clusters can be the result of a one-time event, which isn't good, but
it's not a drive-killing thing. But if the clusters keep growing, it's a
sign that the drive is dying.

You could try downloading the diagnostic program from the hard drive
manufacturer's website and see what that says. And in some cases, you need
the results from that program if you want to return a drive under warranty.

 

[Mae T]

do you Defrag?

 

[Ritter197]

Yes, all the time with professional Diskkeeeper Pro software.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Just two notes here. The Defragger built in to XP is Disk Keeper Lite.
Second, the service man probably made that up if your Disk Keeper
software hasn't identified any bad clusters on the hard drive. Try
using ScanDisk (right click on the "bad" drive and click Properties,
Tools, then ScanDisk. It will tell you if you have bad clusters or not.
I usually see Blue Screens from hardware conflicts or bad memory, not
because of a bad read from the hard drive.

 

[cquirke (MVP Win9x)]

On Fri, 27 Aug 2004 21:11:16 -0400, "Ritter197"

How can I find out whether there are bad clusters on a harddrive?

Best is to test the HD with an OS-agnostic diagnostic. You cannot
trust the OS with this stuff, especially if NTFS.

If not NTFS, you can use DOS mode Scandisk and surface scan. That
shows a map of cluster space with previously "fixed" bad clusters
visible - plus you can see latency when the HD's firmware tries to
"fix" bad sectors (thus hiding impending failure from you).

But Scandisk can't test NTFS, and ChkDsk /R is even more aggressive in
hiding impending failure from you. No prompts on errors, it "fixes"
automatically - plus, you have two levels of on-the-fly failure-hiding
systems, the HD's own firmware plus NTFS's on-the-fly "fixing".

That being the case, NTFS is more likely to have hidden bad sectors
from you, and so it becomes more important to see what has been going
on - by reading SMART's logs of what has been "fixed" at the HD
firmware level at least. The HD vendor's web site usually has free
tools that gives a "quick" test (just an editorialized summary of
stored SMART logs) plus a longer test that actually tries reading the
HD disk surface, rather than looking only at SMART logs.

OTOH, some 3rd-party utils such as AIDA32 give you more detailed SMART
info; e.g. instead of "normal", an actual error count.

Yet the service man told my daughter, her harddrive had bad clusters which
every now and then gave her a blue screen and said the system has to shut
down.

Bad clusters are like small strokes. You will lose data,
functionality, possibly the whole installation, if you let them bite.

I have that HD now in my external housing and see nothing bad, but I might
be missing something.

Those are highly at risk, because:
- wobbly power and cabling
- poor ventillation
- risk of being dropped

If you want to kill a HD, then cook it, spike the power to it, and
spin it up and down a lot.

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Who is General Failure and
why is he reading my disk?

 

[cquirke (MVP Win9x)]

Thank you so much. I found 16 bad clusters.

http://cquirke.mvps.org/pccrisis.htm refers!

An image copy of the whole partition or HD can take days, and if the
HD dies partway through, you have nothing. So:
- first "cherry-pick" your data off
- then do a full image backup
- then (and only then) do full HD diagnostics

At the first bad cluster, you know you have to pull your data off.
Another three hours of gruelling diags won't change that, but could
kill the HD (look Ma, no data!)

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