HDD Bad Sector Question

Hi

Basically, my laptop got dropped yesterday and my system went up the swanny. Did a HDTune test, 6 bad sectors. Vista booted, but was slow, things wouldn't load, desktop went funny etc etc. Tried a couple of things, no joy.

Formatted the whole drive earlier today with killdisk, put 3 partitions in with gparted, then installed vista and windows 7. All went well. Both vista and 7 run good. Did another HDTune test, now down to 4 bad sectors (but i guess the missing 2 will show up sometime).

Did a CHKDSK and i've found out the bad sectors are on my vista partition as my windows 7 partition check ran with no errors as did my data partition, when it was checking the vista one, chkdsk just froze and stopped responding. Will formatting the drive have bypassed the bad sectors in anyway, or when installing vista, would it bypass the bad sectors in anyway (probably sounds stupid!!!). Also used the WD diagnostics program, and that froze when it came up against the bad sectors and the repair failed.

I do realize that I need a new hdd in the near future, but short of funds at the moment, so basically want to know whether just the vista partition may screw up, or will the whole lot screw up again, or will a be safe for a little bit till i can get a new one.

Cheers

 

Usualy harddrives can tolerate SOME (not too many) bad sectors and fix itself as it may use another part of the harddrive to replace those bad sectors, so that's maybe what you've been seeing when you first had 6 and then went down to 4.

Your first partition may or may not be usable later on. If it's not working out correctly for you, you can try to partition out the bad space so you can use the rest of the harddrive.

For example if you have a 100GB hdd, first partition is 10GB other is 10GB and 80GB. If the faulty sectors are on the first 10GB you could try partition that 10GB partition up to several small partitions and in that manner try to find where exactly those bad sectors are located. And when/if you find it, leave that partition and use the rest of the drive as whatever you want as they don't have any bad sectors.

Just a tip so you can still use it for something after you bought a new one to replace it with.

 

As long as you dont use your vista partition things should be fine

I had a bad sector come up on my (at the time 5yrold) hitachi harddrive. I noticed their was something up, because if I had less than 20gb on the drive everything was fine, but when I filled up past 23gb, it would freeze up. That is because that was where the bad sector was.
I hadnt known their was a bad sector so I still ran it for a year before finding hdtune. When I found bad sectors, I replaced the drive with my samsung drive.

So all and all if you dont use your vista partition your system will run fine.
If you continue to use your vista partition, you may cause more trouble to the drive than its worth.

K-TRON

 

Cheers guys, looks like it's windows 7 for now till i get a new drive!!!!! Although I could try some trial and error, but may leave that for a couple of days. I'm a bit sick of partitioning and re-installing OS's for the time being lol!!!

As long as I can get some use till I get a new one, i'll be happy. Hopefully get a 320gb soonish, but not sure when.

 

A few things to point out. Bad sectors appearing slowly on a drive that is not moved at all could be just unlucky but generally it should not happen. They can usually be mapped out by a full scandisc etc but its worth keeping backups of the data.

Bad sectors that appear after the disc has been dropped while in use are usually caused by the head hitting the disc. This can break off the surface compounds that coat the disc and scatter them inside causing other problems. This is really the time to get all data backed up and a replacement drive put in the system. The broken surface particles will generally find there way between the head and disc at just the moment you really don't want it to die.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_crash

 

I usually use ranish partition manager for this. It has a verify switch, and you can stop it when you want to. You start the verification process, and when it stalls, stop it, note down the location of the cylinder, head, sector. I would recommend partitionning around the whole cylinder as the debris of the headcrash may be scattered on that whole ring as the drive spins. With ranish partition manager, you can see coordinates in cylinder, head, sector, so it's easy to partition around. The thing though is these days logical locations are not always correlated to physical locations, but it's still the safest guess. I have a failed HDD that had a few bad sectors and it still worked for years after i partitioned it like this. Though it was still slower than usual.