Bad Sectors

[Jay C]

Hi,


My laptop froze-up and I had to do a hard restart.
Upon reboot, the drive seemed sluggish, so I ran norton
disk doctor, with the free space test enabled. CHKDSK found
8kb of bad sectors. I went to the seagate website &
downloaded the seagate desktop software.

I ran the extended test, & it found the bad sectors, &
attempted to repair them, this is a 2.5" SMART HDD.
The bad sectors were fixed & are no longer on the drive.

XP pro SP2 still showed the 8kb of bad sectors, so I
downloaded a few other HDD manufacturers tests, which none
report, any bad sectors at all.


I remeber, when CHKDSK ran, & moved the data off, then
marked these 2 sectors

$badsect


I tried to find these, but search stated they did not
reside, in hidden files and folders, on the C: drive

Is this drive truly fixed as I suspect, or is CHKDSK
reporting them?
Is this a possible residual, of when they were marked as
bad by CHKDSK?


Thanks,

JC

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

Hi,


My laptop froze-up and I had to do a hard restart.
Upon reboot, the drive seemed sluggish, so I ran norton
disk doctor, with the free space test enabled. CHKDSK found
8kb of bad sectors. I went to the seagate website &
downloaded the seagate desktop software.

I ran the extended test, & it found the bad sectors, &
attempted to repair them, this is a 2.5" SMART HDD.
The bad sectors were fixed & are no longer on the drive.

XP pro SP2 still showed the 8kb of bad sectors, so I
downloaded a few other HDD manufacturers tests, which none
report, any bad sectors at all.


I remeber, when CHKDSK ran, & moved the data off, then
marked these 2 sectors

$badsect


I tried to find these, but search stated they did not
reside, in hidden files and folders, on the C: drive

Is this drive truly fixed as I suspect, or is CHKDSK
reporting them?
Is this a possible residual, of when they were marked as
bad by CHKDSK?


Thanks,

JC

In my experience, most disks with bad sectors fail after
a while. If the laptop was essential for my work then I
would replace the disk while I could. If it was not essential
then I would chance it.

 

[John R Weiss]

My laptop froze-up and I had to do a hard restart.
Upon reboot, the drive seemed sluggish, so I ran norton
disk doctor, with the free space test enabled. CHKDSK found
8kb of bad sectors. I went to the seagate website &
downloaded the seagate desktop software.

On modern HDs, when bad sectors begin to appear, failure is imminent. Replace
the drive.

 

[Guest]

Once you run a disk management tool over the hard drive and it 'flags' bad
secotrs: other tools should identify the same errors as that sector is still
on the disk but made unavailable to application attempting to write to the
disk.

There is not a user 'viewable' link between the actual drive / file layout
and your folders.

Consider that your 'Folders' are an index to the Hard Drive. You look up an
entry and it takes you striaght to the file. All part of system / drive
management.

You will not be able to get to the sectors on the hard drive and 'read' any
information unless you get some forensic software - expensive.

Better investment by far is to Backup all your information: use an external
hard drive and perform a Ghost backup.

You then should consider getting a replacement drive ASAP.

You should be able to use Ghost to transfer your image to the new Hard Drive.

In order to avoid further problems / frustration try to buy the same drive
make / model / capacity.

When one uses Ghost to image / back up / restore to a different drive
Windows will not work. It will require a Repair Installation to reset
Windows to the new hardware and generally OEM versions of Windows: especially
those supplied with Laptops do not have a retail type CD. In this I mean
that Laptops have a System Restore CD set that resinstates a factory fresh
state. It is impossible to perform other action, including recovery, repair
etc.

 

[Michael Pardee]

Count me in with the others. Back up everything you care
about NOW and get a new hard drive. The drive will get
worse very fast from this point.

Mike