What causes bad sectors on a hard drive? A friend of mine says he has some, and said he thought it was because his computer was locking up a lot. Eventually he had to reformat, and after that he found several bad sectors on his hard drive. I said I thought he had the cause and effect flipped backwards: The bad sectors caused the lock ups, and I think bad sectors come from faulty or abused hardware. I was also curious if they could be recovered? Any ideas on the cause or a possible cure?
You know a sector is bad when Domino’s won’t deliver there
Lots of thing cause bad sectors on a harddrive. Generally it is some sort of physical damage to the disk itself.
Bad sectors aren’t the end of the world. In fact, every harddrive ever shipped has a few so they are manufactured with slightly more space to allow for the lost space due to bad sectors.
Bad sectors can certainly be causing trouble on your friends computer. An easy way around this is to run Scandisk and do a FULL scan of the harddrive. When the computer comes across a bad sector it will mark it as such and the computer will never use that space again.
Unfortunately if the bad sector corrupted some necessary files to your friends computer then it may be too late and a reinstallation of the operating system or affected program will be in order.
If the computer reports an especially high number of bad sectors (say 20 or more) the harddrive may be failing and it’s time to buy a new one. At the very least frequent Scnadisk runs are ion order every few days for awhile to see if the number of bad sectors keeps increasing again indicating a dying harddrive. On a ‘normal’ drive bad sectors should appear infrequently.
(Visible) bad sectors on an IDE hard drive are very bad news for a few reasons. As others have pointed out they usually indicative of damage to the disk media itself.
Based on 13+ years of dealing with IDE hard drives from the earliest 20 meg Connors to the latest multi gig units I will usually always replace a drive with even only a few bad sectors. Even if the bad sectors are locked out, in many cases even one bad sector generally foreshadows stormy weather ahead as bad sectors tend to accumulate over time and the overall reliability of the disk is highly suspect.
Others may have different experiences with bad sectors being harmless, and in a few cases I have seen disks where the bad sectors did not spread but in my experience with such disks this is function of luck more than anything else.
There are recovery programs that sometimes will recover a sector but if the media is damaged to the extent the sector cannot be read initally such “recovery” is generally short lived and the sector often goes bad again.
Bad sectors locked out in the manufacturing process are generally due to inherent manufacturing imperfections and not collision damage to the media. Bad sectors after the fact are often due to impact damage and larger scale media failure is often just around the corner.
Disks are so cheap nowadays and information is so valuable it is a false economy to keep a disk online with even one bad sector. But that’s just my opinion.
Bad sectors on an IDE are bad juju. An increase in bad sectors on an IDE drive is extremely bad juju and time to replace the drive before any more data is lost. :eek:
IDE drives are low-level formatted at the factory. Somewhere on the drive exists a chunk of reserve sectors that the drive’s internal logic will use to swap out a failed sector that’s been ientified by the drive’s internal diagnostics. Internally-remapped bad sectors will be invisible to you. When you see any number of bad sectors appear on an IDE drive, it’s because the drive has run out of spare sectors and can no longer repair itself. This is also why you can not and must not attempt to low-level format an IDE drive.
If a drive begins to fail while still in warranty (Western Digital’s got a 3-year warranty, for example) keep in mind that once you go through the hassle of arranging for an advance exchange unit (or simply having a dead computer for a couple weeks) the replacement drive will be a remanufactured drive of the same size. Doesn’t matter if you paid $250 for a 2 gigabyte drive two years ago, and now you can buy a 10 gig drive for the same price. :mad: You’re better off just buying a new drive.
(Been there, done that)