Mfr's policy re bad sectors in new HDD ?

P

pjdd

A new 200GB Seagate PATA drive that I received yesterday was behaving
suspiciously, so I ran a surface scan and sure enough, it had more than
100 bad sectors closely clumped together in one 50GB partition. I
stopped the scan after some 6 hours while it was still finding more bad
sectors.

I live in a remote area and I have an understanding with my regular
suppliers in a distant city. If I find anything unsatisfactory, I give
them a call and they send a replacement, no questions asked. So no
problem there.

But I'd like to know what hard disk manufacturers' policies usually are
in cases like this. And what if there were only one or two bad sectors
and the drive was otherwise working fine ?

Other details :
1) There was no problem partitioning it with Partition Magic.
2) No problem full formatting with DOS the partition where the bad
sectors are concentrated. Didn't try formatting in Windows.
3) No problem copying 15GBs of data on to the defective 50GB partition.
4) No problem loading a Ghost file to the boot partition.
5) The problem was that Win XP always ran an interminable disk check of
the bad partition while booting up. It boots OK if the disk check is
skipped.
6) No problem booting if the defective partition is empty.

Please share your experiences in similar cases.
 
I

Ian East

A new 200GB Seagate PATA drive that I received yesterday was behaving
suspiciously, so I ran a surface scan and sure enough, it had more than
100 bad sectors closely clumped together in one 50GB partition. I
stopped the scan after some 6 hours while it was still finding more bad
sectors.

I live in a remote area and I have an understanding with my regular
suppliers in a distant city. If I find anything unsatisfactory, I give
them a call and they send a replacement, no questions asked. So no
problem there.

But I'd like to know what hard disk manufacturers' policies usually are
in cases like this. And what if there were only one or two bad sectors
and the drive was otherwise working fine ?

Other details :
1) There was no problem partitioning it with Partition Magic.
2) No problem full formatting with DOS the partition where the bad
sectors are concentrated. Didn't try formatting in Windows.
3) No problem copying 15GBs of data on to the defective 50GB partition.
4) No problem loading a Ghost file to the boot partition.
5) The problem was that Win XP always ran an interminable disk check of
the bad partition while booting up. It boots OK if the disk check is
skipped.
6) No problem booting if the defective partition is empty.

Please share your experiences in similar cases.

First off... Check the disks SMART status. If it's pre-fail (which
it probably is), they will unquestionably replace it. Otherwise, I
return about 10 disks per week just because the RAID device they're in
says they're bad and they never question it. However they will
replace it with a refurb.
 

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