Dang, my m1330 has bad sectors already!

just received my m1330 last week and have not played around too much!

What I have done to the hard disk are making a whole disk image using Acronis True Image, recovering to factory condition once, defragmentation several times, checking errors several time (by which I found bad sectors).

this m1330 is a refurbished one, from dell outlet. maybe the hard disk is a refurbished part? when I ordered, it said the HD is a EIDE 250G not SATA. did dell ever use EIDE on m1330?

generally i love this machine, but i will contact dell to check on this. i believe i am still in 21-day safe period.

 

ya you should, iw oudln't even deal with it.

 

Its sata, not eide. its marked wrong. Anyways, they will just send you a new hard drive if you want. Thats what i would do if you are happy with the rest of the laptop.

 

how about the old one? some tech guy will come to install it or i have to install it myself?

thanks,

 

It's a user replaceable item. 4 screws, a slap and a tickle and you're done.

 

Yeah for a modern drive to report bad sectors its got to be really screwed up. Nearly all drives still have some bad sectors but a section of the drive is reserved for swapping out these bad sectors with good ones to make it invisible to the OS. As new bad sectors arise, the drive is supposed to continue to hide them, remapping the bad sectors to the reserved section of the drive. Used to be anytime you formatted a drive < 10% bad sectors was considered normal. Now the hard drive manufacturers just hide this from you.

 

sounds my hard disk is really bad?
the bad sectors (reported to be 4kb only) were discovered by regular windows disk check (scan for bad sectors).

 

Try downloading an running a SMART monitor utility. These can read the drive's health status and warn of potential failures. MacOS will tell you when a drive is about to go bad according to the SMART, but Windows doesn't have anything built in.

 

Here's a link to Wikipedia's SMART entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis,_and_Reporting_Technology

One possible reason you can see the bad sectors is that the drive's got so many bad sectors that it's filled up it's remap area already. But it could be a lot of things.

 

just contacted dell by web chat, they do NOT want to replace the hard drive! they think bad sectors are not going to spread and will only replace the hard drive when it begins to make troubles!
i have over 200 g on the c: partition and it runs ok now, but who knows it is going to cause problem.

does dell always do this on refurbished one selling on dell outlet?

 

I also got this, and they claimed that if you reformat the drive, the problem may go away, so unless it's a recurring problem, they won't replace the drive.

I am guessing this applies to new and outlet; if new, though, you can just request a replacement, at which point I'd imaginw they'd prefer sending you a HDD instead.

 

I don't know Dell's policy, but again, you should check the SMART status of the drive. It can't predict all failures, but if it shows that if it is going to fail soon or has tons of errors Dell might replace it.

Personally, I would never buy a refurb notebook hard drive. You never know how much the previous owner banged up the drive while it was spinning. That causes drive failure. And I'm not suggesting you cause drive failure by banging the drive while it's spinning.

As for the suggestion to reformat the drive to get rid of the bad sectors, that could be a bad idea. The bad sectors might be marginal and might not get picked up as bad on the next reformat. The drive controller may detect it and remap it to another sector, but it might not, and it may get marked good and your data could get stored there and eventually fail.

 

There is such a thing as a 'soft' bad sector. You need to make Dell understand that if there is a bad sector issue there is ALREADY a problem, because your data is 0% safe. Even with a single bad sector.

Give them the choice to fix the drive or return the computer, because it sounds like (to me) they are refusing to honor the warranty.

 

i tried hd tune, not working, could not recognize hard disk. so i tried active smart program (a shareware), it says my HD is healthy.
this hard disk may be ok expect the 4kb bad sectors

 

Then, it should develop some immediate serious 'problems' - right??

 

The 4 KB of bad sectors may be within tolerance.
But if it continues to develop bad sectors, you will want to replace it.

I'm currently using a 120 GB desktop drive that has over 10 MB of bad sectors. I didn't realize it until I actually started to use the space (should have done a thorough check of it when I first got it). But it's stayed the same for over 3 years now, not getting any worse.