Re: What is the MFT?

Tech-Archive recommends: Repair Windows Errors & Optimize Windows Performance


Richard Urban wrote:
Bad sectors are never repairable. A new drive has X amount of sectors in
reserve. When a bad sector is encountered, it is automatically switched out
for a good sector.

Depends on the bad sector. For example, my hard drive had a few bad
sectors cropping up but only has a 1 reallocated sector (which is
obviously low - manufacturers would give much more room for
reallocation.) If a bad sector is visible to the operating system,
then you can overwrite the bad sector for a chance to reclaim it. You
should also keep watch for sectors that take a while to read from.

Sometimes it works, but other times it doesn't. When it does work, the
OS and hard drive won't be able to tell the difference - most likely
the data was written down incorrectly. In my case, it did work - and
it didn't increase the reallocated sector count. You should still keep
watch for symptoms of a failing drive, as always.

The OS may have still marked the sector as bad even when it is usable.
There are ways to unmark the sector (which is easy under FAT/FAT32),
but you can at least store something there when necessary.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: What is the MFT?
    ... I believe this happened when I shut down my computer cause it was going to an automatic recovery instead of giving me ... When a bad sector is encountered, ... it didn't increase the reallocated sector count. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: Seagate SMART, Raw Read Error Rate, Seek Error Rate
    ... It represents a sector that the drive has given up on, ... be counter as "reallocation event" or "reallocated sector ... Personally I stop trustinf a disk around 10 or so, ... it captures SMART data and appends it to a log file. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: Hard drive failing? Reallocated Sector count warning
    ... only a couple years old now is showing a ... :> yellow highlighted bar for the Reallocated Sector count in HD ... Looking at just these two, your disk has exactly one bad sector. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)
  • Re: What is the MFT?
    ... sectors cropping up but only has a 1 reallocated sector (which is ... If a bad sector is visible to the operating system, ... should also keep watch for sectors that take a while to read from. ... it didn't increase the reallocated sector count. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: HDD suddenly failed, please help - Update
    ... obscene reallocated sector count. ... What makes you think that 05 is vendor specific? ... A pending sector may be a bad sector. ...
    (comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage)