Re: Bad sectors on hard drive
From: Dan Seur (click_at_casta.net)
Date: 05/16/04
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Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 12:10:25 -0400
Jim -
1. You should download and run the manufacturer's drive diagnostic for
that drive, from their website. It'll be a bootable diskette image. When
booted it will report drive anomalies/problems it detects, and may be
able to repair some. It will advise you to contact tech support for
further instructions if problems cannot be corrected; tech support may
offer you a free replacement drive.
2. Many drive failures are progressive, and that may be what you are
experiencing. In the case of bad sectors, for instance, imagine a
slightly misaligned head tearing up the oxide surface, or a tiny piece
of dust doing the same thing as it gets shoved around in that
environment of microscopic clearances. Think of a snowplow pushing
gravel. Back up any precious data on that drive immediately.
3. The autocheck run at boot is a normal W2k response to a variety of
drive conditions W2k can detect at boot. Some conditions have nothing to
do with hardware failure (sudden power loss in the middle of a disk
access operation may leave files and/or indexes imperfect, for example),
but yours sounds like a warning of impending doom. Or doom itself.
4. Any unusual noise from a drive is a Very Bad Sign.
5. Simply marking bad sectors (the diagnostic can do this) by any method
is no help if the number of bad sectors is constantly increasing.
6. If you have a "general utilities" suite on that machine that has
disk-inspection capability, such will probably report bad problems. If
you can get it to run at all.
7. Laptops are not invulnerable to rough handling, although they're
usually designed to tolerate some. It's not unheard of for a replacement
drive to be bad. Either of these scenarios might account for your
misfortune.
HTH and good luck.
Jim wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a laptop running Windows 2000 Professional. I
> replaced the hard drive a while ago, but lately have been
> having trouble with bad sectors. It started when programs
> started hanging up, hard drive making repetive noises
> (clicking, etc..like it was laboring to find files). Now
> upon boot, it runs CHKDSK, and had found 100's of "File
> record segment XXXXX is unreadable." It then says it is
> removing,etc.. Each time I boot this automatically runs
> now.
>
> But within Windows, I encounter the same problems with
> apps hanging and the HD making noise. I believe I have
> physical damage to some sectors(or virus). I want to
> reformat and fix then reload.
>
> My question is: What is the best way to take care of this
> to 'mark' the bad sectors so they are not used when I
> reload. Do I reformat, then use FDISK or something?
>
> I have heard that CHKDSK /R will fix. This is actually
> what is run when I boot each time. If I run plain CHKDSK
> in a DOS window, it ends saying "CHKDSK cannot continue in
> read-only mode" so then I try CHKDSK /R and it says "The
> type of the file system is NTFS. Cannot lock current
> drive" and then "CHKDSK cannot run because the volume is
> in use by another process" and asks me to schedule it for
> boot.
>
> Any ideas??
>
> Jim
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