An HDD problem

[Guest]

Here's the story - about 3 yaers ago I bought a computer with 6.2 Gb WD HDD. About a year later the drive became a drive with bad clusters. I replaced it and in about 2 years the new drive also got some bad clusters. I bought an IBM HDD and in about a year it also got bad clusters.
Recently, I've upgraded to some newer hardware - new motherboard (Asus CUSL-2), new video card (MSI Geforce2MX), and also got a new IBM 30Gb drive. Last night the new drive (Been in use less than a month !!!) got some bad sectors.
I don't know what to think, I've replaced almost all the hardware inside the PC and I still got this bad sectors problem in all my HDDs. Is it the power supply ?
My configuration is :
Celeron 667 (not overclocked)
Asus CUSL-2 M/B
128 MB of 100 Mhz RAM
IBM 75 GXP 30 Gb HDD (7200 RPM)
MSI Geforce2MX video card

Appreciate your help.

 

[LTJLover]

What exactly do you mean when you say it got some bad sectors? Every hard drive has some bad sectors from production. During a format those sectors are marked as bad. The number of these bad sectors is marginal and usually ignorable. Does your drive still work or is it dead?

Jon
"Water-Cooled CPU Runner"

 

[Guest]

That wasn't the case. I worked with this drive all right, and all of a sudden (in the middle of DivX movie, damn !) The PC froze. When I ran a Scandisk, it discovered a bad sector, a new one.
One more thing - there are no bad sectors from production, or at least souldn't be any. The HDD should be as clean as a baby's bottom in the day of birth.

My drive still works, but this is not the point. The point is - some data was damaged. That means - I have bad sectors appearing on ALL my HDDs and that's what worries me.

 

[jobe]

I understand your pain my friend, however, the good news is that a bad sector does not always mean Physical damage on the media.
When the drive is formatted it adds overhead to the begining and end of the track sector. A bad sector in most cases is simple just lost info in the overhead so it can not ID it properly anymore. If you do a full re-format from a DOS prompt it will show you if it needs to allocate bad sectors, in which case it wouls be physical damage.

Otherwise its does its not much to worry about.

jObE

 

[Guest]

Hi, jObE.
Thanks for your help, but, again, I don't think this is it. When the HDD works propelry and all of a sudden it starts to make some strange noises (like spin down, spin up again, doing some activity and then spin down again), I think that the media became physically damaged. Which is fine for me, but what I can't understand is - why all the HDDs got bad sectors inside the same PC ?

 

[misu]

mount your (new) drives with 3 screws, I know the 3-rd is harder
don't take your drive out in cold/wet ...
don't kick your comp case

and there are bad sectors when you get your drive brand new, it's just you can't see them. In scsi they are called manufacturer defect list (or smth) and the really bad ones are in the growing defect list

 

[Guest]

The bad sectors that appeared are new and not from production failure. Those bad sectors caused some serious data loss.