Bad sectors on hard drives

Anyone ever get a hard drive with bad sectors on it? How serious of a problem are they? If you have one should you return the drive or just use some software to mark it as unwritable and live with it. I've heard of people using hard drives for years this way but I've also heard that if you have one you should back up your data and replace the drive. Whats your opinion?

 

well all harddrives going to get bad sectors depending how many you have is how id judge to take it back or not if your losing megabytes of space no use but its up in the gigs id take it back.

 

So I shouldn't be worried if my HDtune came back with two bad sectors?

 

IF at all possible, get it replaced. It's often a sign that more errors are going to occur. Doesn't matter if you lose 1 byte or 50 GB. Data corruption is bad. No matter what.

Losing one byte of a 4GB file still means 4GB lost data.

And no matter how few bad sectors you have, you've got to ask, why did it occur? Isn't it likely to happen again?

I'd get rid of it. If it's covered by warranty, send it back. Otherwise, just buy another.

 

Get it replaced. I just fixed this situation today on my desktop. I had one bad sector/damaged sector that was making my computer freeze randomly at random times. I used Apricorn to clone my HDD to a new HDD and that fixed the problem.

I recommend Apricorn. The process was so easy, put the new HDD in enclosure, boot from CD, follow instructions, replace HDDs your good to go. And the cloning was the best. No problem. Whole process took less than two hours to clone and replace the HDD. This was with a desktop so maybe three hours for a notebook.

 

Bad sectors can be repaired in a veriety of ways. My most fav is to run the repair console from a windows setup disk. If you boot of the disk once it load the first screen will let you enter the repair by pressing r. at prompt press 1 then enter. Next prompt type chkdsk /r then enter. If this takes more then a few hours i would try to rma the drive. If it does not finish in the day definitely rma it. To rma the drive you will have to run the respective manufs testing util. Hitach has theirs wd has their own. Write down the error code that it gives you. Wd has an exe test util that can be executed in windows. Bad sectors are not bad as long as they are flagged as bad.

 

isn't and IDE drive supposed to manage it's own bad sector table? It has always been my rule of thumb when and IDE (and I guess now SATA) drive begins to report bad sectors it is time to replace the drive because something is wrong with the drive electronics.

Given the low cost of drives it's just not worth the headache of a slowly failing drive that could fail completely at any time.

 

Not at all. Unflagged bad sectors can do any number of things which include the persistant scan disk, or long load times even windows permanent crash. Too many to list. If you suspect you have bad sectors do run the manuf diagnostics utility.

 

No, bad sectors can not be repaired at all. They can be marked so they won't be used in the future, but that's not repairing. (And you may still lose the data that was initially on that sector)

And you're still basically only treating the symptom, not the cause. Bad sectors should not occur in the first place. If they do, there is a problem.

Sure, repair them and keep using the drive, if you don't care about your data. If the disk only holds your Windows installation and other apps that can be easily replaced, it might even be safe to do so.
Just don't keep anything on it that is important.

 

jalf:

Exactly...when one of today's HDDs starts to show bad sectors it's done for and nothing can fix it. In the old RLL (or was it RLE???) drives we could setup a bad sector map as well as for SCSI drives. It was part of the setup process for a drive.

For others a drive's bad sector map is a looktable the drive uses to know where the bad sectors are and not to use them for data. Thing is drives have sectors go bad every now and then and we will never know because the drives internal electronics manages them for us. But when it gets too much for the drives firmware or the electronics is on it's way out, the drive no longer knows not to use those bad sectors. Thus data gets lost/corrupted.

The cause can be bad head mechanics, air leaks allowing dust particles and changine the internal pressure...simple heat expansion of parts during operation. One thing though is if it's the heads and touching the platter the drive pretty much goes up in flames right away...afterall those platters are MOVING as they spin...

No matter the drive is foobar'd...I would get a new one for $75 or whatever...

 

I've taken hundreds of hard drives apart at http://www.freegeek.org the discs are beyond mirror polished and are more like what you would find in a telescope. any little piece of dust that gits between the dics and head will damage the disc. no matter how good you clean the air there will always be dust in it. As the disc gets old pieces of the ribbon cable that goes to the read wright heads will flake off from dry rot. There is nothing you can do about it. That's why it is important to use backups.