Bad sectors on a new drive

[news.ntlworld.com]

I've just installed a Seagate Barraacuda 120Gb Hard Drive as a slave. After formating I ran Scan
Disk (Win 98) and it found Bad Sectors on the disk.
Is it normal for a new disk to have Bad Sectors or is this a faulty disk?
Should I just mark the bad sectors and start using the disk?

Thanks for your advice.

 

[Ron Reaugh]

I've just installed a Seagate Barraacuda 120Gb Hard Drive as a slave. After formating I ran Scan
Disk (Win 98) and it found Bad Sectors on the disk.
Is it normal for a new disk to have Bad Sectors or is this a faulty disk?

NO!

Should I just mark the bad sectors and start using the disk?

Probably not.

What to do next is the question. It may be a bad HD or just some other
artifact. How much time do you want to spend finding out?

 

[Eric Gisin]

You should download SeaTools, copy it to floppy, and run full diagnostics.

| I've just installed a Seagate Barraacuda 120Gb Hard Drive as a slave. After
formating I ran Scan
| Disk (Win 98) and it found Bad Sectors on the disk.
| Is it normal for a new disk to have Bad Sectors or is this a faulty disk?
| Should I just mark the bad sectors and start using the disk?
|
| Thanks for your advice.
|

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

NO!

NO! to what, imposter?

 

[CJT]

I've just installed a Seagate Barraacuda 120Gb Hard Drive as a slave. After formating I ran Scan
Disk (Win 98) and it found Bad Sectors on the disk.
Is it normal for a new disk to have Bad Sectors or is this a faulty disk?
Should I just mark the bad sectors and start using the disk?

Thanks for your advice.

Modern drives should remap bad sectors so you don't see them until the
point at which they overwhelm the spares available. Modern drives
also generally have S.M.A.R.T. capabilities which may be helpful in
determining what's wrong.

Seagate drives in my experience have been pretty good -- I would
suspect your cabling and/or power supply.

 

[news.ntlworld.com]

You should download SeaTools, copy it to floppy, and run full diagnostics..

I just did that, and no problem was found.
Norton disk doctor (Norton Utility 2000) will not run on the disk, it states "The disk may not be
configurated properly".

 

[Svend Olaf Mikkelsen]

I just did that, and no problem was found.
Norton disk doctor (Norton Utility 2000) will not run on the disk, it
states "The disk may not be
configurated properly".

There is a serious Windows bug (the 32 GB problem), which Microsoft
gives a benign description. You may have run into the benign
description:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;243450

 

[news.ntlworld.com]

news.ntlworld.com, (e-mail address removed) escribió en el mensaje,

I just did that, and no problem was found.
Norton disk doctor (Norton Utility 2000) will not run on the disk, it states "The disk may not be
configurated properly".

Im sorry I made a mistake, Scan Disk is reporting Bad clusters Not Bad Sectors

 

[CJT]

news.ntlworld.com, (e-mail address removed) escribió en el mensaje,


Im sorry I made a mistake, Scan Disk is reporting Bad clusters Not Bad Sectors

1) cabling
2) power supply

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

There is a serious Windows bug (the 32 GB problem), which Microsoft
gives a benign description.

By benign, did you mean that bullshit where they try to shove off their
own stupidity on to Phoenix for offering different CHS translations
(that is limited to 8GB) when that obviously can't have anything to do
with problems that concern addressing above 32 GB?

 

[news.ntlworld.com]

1) cabling
2) power supply

The bad clusters are allways found starting with cluster 308592.
If it was cabling or power supply would the erors not be more random?

 

[Eric Gisin]

You probably have a BIOS bug or configuration problem. Delete the partition
and make sure drive setup is set to AUTO. Try again.

That cluster is sector 9,8750,000 with the default cluster of 32KB.


The bad clusters are allways found starting with cluster 308592.
If it was cabling or power supply would the erors not be more random?

 

[CJT]

The bad clusters are allways found starting with cluster 308592.
If it was cabling or power supply would the erors not be more random?

It could have been cabling or the PS that caused the bad cluster in the
first place -- now that it exists, of course you'll see it every time
until you reformat. The drive's bad sector management won't see it
unless the software actually tries to read the cluster, and I think
having it marked as bad will keep that from happening.

I suppose you might also have the drive's bad sector management turned
off -- I think some drives allow that.

 

[Papa]

Shouldn't happen. Send it back.

 

[Rod Speed]

Shouldn't happen. Send it back.

And will likely see the same problem with the replacement.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

The bad clusters are allways found starting with cluster 308592.
If it was cabling or power supply would the erors not be more random?

Nope, once bad stays bad until taken care of (through a rewrite).

And please, disable Quoted Printable.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

That's basically the same except that the bad sector is part
of the cluster, as Scandisk only reads clusters, not sectors.

It could have been cabling or the PS that caused the bad cluster in the
first place -- now that it exists,

of course you'll see it every time

Yup, on a read of the bad sector.

until you reformat.

Nope, reformatting won't change that. You need to overwrite the bad sectors.
An erase would take care of that.

The drive's bad sector management won't see it
unless the software actually tries to read the cluster,

And how do you think the drive and scandisk decided that the sector, and
therefor the cluster that it is in, was bad?

and I think having it marked as bad will keep that from happening.

*If* it is marked as bad in the FAT.

I suppose you might also have the drive's bad sector management turned
off -- I think some drives allow that.

And even supposing that were true for a moment, what would that change?

 

[CJT]

"CJT" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected] news.ntlworld.com wrote:


And even supposing that were true for a moment, what would that change?

It would mean the OS (and user) would see a bad sector that might
otherwise be taken care of by the drive. (Almost) All drives have
bad sectors, and there's nothing wrong with having a few, but usually
on modern drives they're transparently substituted out. It's when
there are so many that they overwhelm the spares, or when they grow
rapidly, that there's a problem.

 

[news.ntlworld.com]

It could have been cabling or the PS that caused the bad cluster in the
first place -- now that it exists, of course you'll see it every time
until you reformat. The drive's bad sector management won't see it
unless the software actually tries to read the cluster, and I think
having it marked as bad will keep that from happening.

I used Seatools to write zeros (full) to the disk, and then formated it again.
The bad clusters were still found, starting with cluster 308592.
I did try the "ScanDisk Errors on IDE Hard Disks Larger Than 32 GB" fix at
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;243450 but the problem remains.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

You probably have a BIOS bug or configuration problem. Delete the
partition and make sure drive setup is set to AUTO. Try again.

That cluster is sector 9,8750,000 with the default cluster of 32KB.

Presumably you meant 9,875,000 ?

Don't think so. More like twice that: 19,749,888
And that number is an offset to the start of the system
area in the partition, not the actual physical sector.

Nevertheless, what is so specific about that number?
It's well over 8GB (well in absolute terms at least).