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Hard drive bad sectors

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by ogie_2001 1 view

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On a reboot of my 80G hard drive that is about 4 months old win 98se told me that there could be bad sectors on the drive and I should do a complete scandisk. Scandisk did indeed find a bad area on the C drive that it marked and attempted to move the data. It turned out the cluster contained parts of a game install which didn't work and had to be reinstalled.

When I told the vendor that I bought the drive from about this he told me that the drive needed to be replaced because the bad sectors would spread until the drive no longer worked. I took the drive into him for testing before he sent it back for replacement and now he tells me that the area only contained data and it will be fine.

Can someone please explain to me why some badsectors spread and others don't. Is this guy telling me the truth or should it be replaced.

Thanks for any input,
Dan

9 replies

by pgcarter

He's lying!! It doesn't matter what files, data or not, that where in the bad sector. It's a new drive, if it has physical damage it needs to be replaced. I'm not sure why bad sectors spread but they do, though often very slowly. Again if it's physical damage the drive can no longer be trusted and that's not what you paid for. Are you sure he did not say that it was just lost clusters, in which case it's not physical damage. If scandisk marks a block as bad, not just that it's found errors and fixed them, then it is physical damage. To find out scan it again (surface nnot nesesary) and when the summary comes up it will say "scandisk found/did not errors" under that it reporst so many bytes in in whatever folders and so may bytes in badsectors,. If it reports that there are bad sectors then they have been marked bad by the surface scan before you did and the drive IS physically damaged.
Hope this helps.

by jereg

Something else you may want to check. The shop that tested the drive may have used something like Ontrack Disk Manager. This program will hide any bad sectors from the operating system. running scandisk would not make them show up. I would repartition the hard drive and test it again.

by ogie_2001

Scandisk did find and mark a bad sector on the drive. It tried to move the data but obviously couldn't.

by 1stladytech

Additionally, the shop owner may have run the manufacture's diagnostics, which will remap bad sectors into the onboard rom, so that they will not show up in a dos level scan. If no other clusters or sectors fail, this is considered a "certified good drive" by the manufactorer. I would request a new drive, if you cannot get the vendor to uphold the warrentee, watch the drive carefully for any signs of failure, keep it backed up, or go directly to the manufactorer's site to do an RMA yourself.IDE drives should not have bad spots, they almost always continue to fail if they start to develop.

Hope this helps,

Vickie

by echrepublic2012

If you often read/write bad sectors, they may propagate. Use PBD(Partition Bad Disk) to isolate the bad sectors.

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