Hard drive problems- Bad sectors

[cgscott]

Right here the problems peeps.

Had a hard drive fresh install of XP.
For a while the hard drive was fine then its started slowing and making noises. So i done fresh install again. Only to find it would no boot past the logo screen and restart.

I ran Hiren Boot CD and ran diagnostics.

Managed to repair bad sectors and it has booted into windows.

Ran Hiren again and decided to use a deep scan program to check sectors.

Came back it has 83 bad sectors again. Although it boots do you think i should just replace the drive in case of future breakdown and if so would the drive be usable as a storage drive alongside an OS drive?

Any help appreciated.

[dasteph]

read somewhere about software sitting on bad sectors of a hard drive and failing to run, better renewing hd as you use it for your o/s then just using it for storage.

[cgscott]

Thats what i thought.

Cheers for the reply. Will use it as storage.

[overge]

i have the same problem

try tuurning it off and back on agan

[cgscott]

try tuurning it off and back on agan

Nice first post.

Welcome to DK

[mark1234]

hmmm..
all HDD;s have bad sectors even new ones , when you run things like scandisk they mark the bad sectors so they are not written to they are flagged bad , so data is written around them , this is quite normal,but when the Os in this case windows does not load , these are first signs of wear and tear , normally a disk performs well about 2 years then slowly goes down hill,

if you do a cold shutdown that is yank the power cable , this does damage similar to that on a record player when it is knocked..and more errors occur,

so if disk is under 2 years it should be okay for , BUT if over 2 years old replace it and use it for none important storage.

goodluck

[cunny]

Load into recovery console.

Do a chkdsk /r

I think there is a way that you can tell windows not to use the sectors that are bad.

You could also try a chkdsk /r /f this will locate bad sectors and also try to fix them. I aint thried this 1 but have on the above and has worked for me in the past.

If the hard drive has that many then would be advisable to swap it for data storage only. Or :

Info obtained from another site :

Here's some info from Microsoft's site about this...

Looks like /f doesn't check for bad sectors while /r does

Manual steps to run Chkdsk at the command prompt
1. Click Start, and then Run.
2. In Open, type cmd, and then press ENTER.
3. Use one of the following procedures: • To run Chkdsk in read-only mode, at the command prompt, type chkdsk, and then press ENTER.
• To repair errors without scanning the volume for bad sectors, at the command prompt, type chkdsk volume:/f, and then press ENTER.

Note If one or more of the files on the hard disk are open, you will receive the following message:
Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)
Type Y, and then press ENTER to schedule the disk check, and then restart your computer to start the disk check.
• To repair errors, locate bad sectors, and recover readable information, at the command prompt, type chkdsk volume:/r, and then press ENTER.

Note If one or more of the files on the hard disk are open, you will receive the following message:
Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)
Type Y, and then press ENTER to schedule the disk check, and then restart your computer to start the disk check.

Failing the above. Do a low level format of the hard drive. This will erase then read each cluster on the hard drive. This will then be stored, with each sector and if its good or bad, hence the bad wont be written to.

[oldeno]

HD Problems

Format again this time make two partitions(C: & D
C: for storage
D: for XP
It might work

[thanassis]

my friend, go to the site of the disk brand (for example if it is Seagate, go to Computer Hard Disk Drives and Storage Solutions (NASDAQ: STX) | Seagate) and you will find for your disk low lever format which can heal your hard disk!!!!
windows have the worst format tool, if you don't want to format it with the tool you will find in the manufacturer site, try to format it from linux!