While running a scandisk I noticed that my laptop has some bad disk sectors or whatever it is called. I am in the last few months of a 3 year extended warentee. Would this be covered?
If this is a gray area how should I present my case to get the HD replaced for free?
btw is a compaq and scandisk reports 57,344 ‘bytes in bad sectors’
I understand that all harddrives are built w/ some extra space to account to bad sectors so when you start seeing bad sectors all ‘spare sectors’ are used up - is this correct?
A few bad sectors aren’t abnormal and I doubt you could get a new hard drive because of that.
That said I don’t see the harm in trying to get a new hard drive. I say give it a shot…you don’t have much to lose except a little of your time.
[rant]Check your own damn warranty. How am I supposed to know what friggin contract you signed[/rant]
Anyway, go get it fixed and you HD replaced. Now. Bad sectors can well mean the HD is failing.
Unless I’m doing my math wrong 57,000 bytes is 57K or 0.057MB. That’s not too bad.
I will say that often once you see bad sectors starting to pop up more may follow. Consider doing a scandisk weekly for two or three weeks (if you have that time under your warranty) and see if more follow. If they do then something is definitely squirrely with your hard drive and you’ll have a better chance at getting it replcaed for no charge.
You should look at your guarantee & see what it says or call the people who enforce it. A three year old HD won’t be made today probably so they would have to put in whatever HD they have today. Anyway, call the people behind the gurantee (are they still around?) & see what they have to say & let us know.
I have used drives with sector reports like that for a couple years safely but as the person said above, if they keep rising you should get a new one.
Yes, you are. There are 1024 bytes in a Kbyte. There are 1024 Kbytes in a megabyte. This comes out to 56K, or .054 MB.
I’ve dealt with lots of drives over the years, both notebook and desktop, and even small, non-hidden media failures like the ones you describe are often the precursor of Very Bad Things to come. I would make the point to Compaq that reliablity of your notebook data is super critical you cannot afford an incipiently flaky hard disk and that it must be replaced. I have been in your shoes in the past with desktop systems (ie small cluster failure on Compaq system) and I have always gotten them to replace the drive.
As a second suggestion you may want to use this an oppy to get a bigger drive and simply chuck the smaller one. 20 - 30 gig 2.5 note book drives are now in the 120 - 160 range at some vendors and Compaq notebook hard drives are usually fairly easy to access and replace.
try http://www.newegg.com for prices