God help me, I hate to semi-duplicate other threads, but really, this is significantly different in that I am also soliciting additional factual imformation. So: Should I get a new hard drive? Background:
I have a Hitachi 80GB drive in my PowerBook. It’s only about a year old. I did a format and install of the new 10.4, and discovered that I have some bad sectors on the drive… I can hear the drive doing a seek repeatedly for certain operations. It’s not the same type of noise as completely dying drives in my experience.
No problem, I thought – I’ll do a low-level format, and this will force the drive to remove all of the bad sectors from the physical structure. It turns out, though, that this is just a carryover from the old days; there’s no such thing as a low-level format for end users any more! The closest thing is writing 0’s to the drive, which is not the same thing, but there’s a lot of misinformation claiming that it is. But to answer my concern that I wanted to map out all of the bad sectors, I “learned” that modern IDE drives automatically do this. They realize they have read errors, get the data, put it into another physical sector, and map out the bad sector. This supposedly happens at the hardware level; no OS involvement is needed.
Except this isn’t happening. Luckily I built a rescue system onto my wife’s poor iPod, and I’m running a program that is supposed to find the bad sectors and map them out. Seems like it may be working. I’ll let it run several times to make sure other bad sectors don’t pop up.
Sooo…. here are the questions.
[ul]
[li]Once the bad sectors are marked, can I partition and format the drive however I want without affecting the bad sector map? Am I right in assuming that this is stored somewhere really, truly deep in the bowels of the drive and that it won’t be affected by partition and format? Or am I going to have to run the bad sector scan every time I wipe a volume?[/li][li]How come the automatic bad sector marking isn’t working? I wouldn’t be going through all this fsck’ing mess (ironically, fsck isn’t being used for this at all) if the automatic bad sector recovery just worked. Is it only certain brands of drives that have this? Is it OS dependant? Is Hitachi just a bad brand?[/li][li]In most people’s experience, should I just get a new drive? Are things going to escalate? Now that I have bad sectors, is it only a matter of time before the bad sectors spread like a fungus to the rest of my sectors? Should I just bite the bullet and purchase a new hard drive? I am attracted to those new 100GB drives, but… everything costs 25% to 50% more in Mexico.[/li][/ul]
You know, if I were home, this wouldn’t be an issue. I’d have another computer there for use, I’d not have to partition and format my wife’s iPod, and I could have a cheap, mail order replacement hard drive tomorrow…