Bad blocks

[kineticman]

I recently unpacked my pc from roughly a year of non-use (just sitting) and now I'm getting errors and freezes constantly on what was a clean machine. In the event viewer I have a ton of "bad block" errors, so I'm planning on running a defrag/diskcheck combo after work today.
My main question is this, I know corruption can occur during long periods of non-use with HDDs, and assuming the drive itself isn't failing mechanically, can this be fixed with disk check, or a full reformat/reinstall? Id like to avoid buying a program like spinrite since I could just buy a new data III drive for the same cost and upgrade. Thanks for any advice.

 

[Pinhedd]

Defrag and chkdsk only deal with the integrity of the filesystem, not the integrity of the physical hard drive itself. Chkdsk can do a rudimentary examination and blockade of bad sectors but it's very rough and is not a good indicator of hard drive health.

This most definitely is a case of hard drive failure and if it hasn't failed mechanically yet it will fail soon.

Go buy a new hard drive and use this one for target practice.

 

[mrbeanladen]

Defrag and chkdsk only deal with the integrity of the filesystem, not the integrity of the physical hard drive itself. Chkdsk can do a rudimentary examination and blockade of bad sectors but it's very rough and is not a good indicator of hard drive health.

This most definitely is a case of hard drive failure and if it hasn't failed mechanically yet it will fail soon.

Go buy a new hard drive and use this one for target practice.

nonononaonaonasdnfihsoihwruhslhfiulwaehriuwheruqhpwhsldfjhdf.
Sometimes it's a bug in your OS, and a chkdsk can fix it, it did it for me and I had the same problem that I posted here a couple of months ago. When It got fixed it got fixed for good, no "reallocated" sectors or anything, so basically it never even existed it was just a bug, probably because I often shut down my pc from the power button instead of shutting it normally, but I don't do it anymore since that time. Just run a chkdsk on ALL drives, including the "system reserved" partition (that you can merge with your windows partition, C:\ probably, google it) and run a full chkdsk including the "scan for and fix bad sectors" box ticked. But if this doesn't fix it you have to get another one like he said.

 

[Hawkeye22]

I'd see what a chkdsk c: /f /r turns up first. It doesn't cost anything to check it out first. If there are still a bunch of bad sectors afterwards, then buy a new drive.

 

[kineticman]

Yeah I'm going to run chkdsk when I get back from school tonight. I'm hoping it's just some corruption from sitting or when I bumped the power strip and shut down in the middle of some updates :/
If not can anyone recommend a good solid state Sata III? I don't know too much about them, but I might as well upgrade since replacing my barracuda will cost roughly the same as a 120GB SSD.

 

[DarkOutlaw]

OCZ
Crucial
Mushkin
Corsair
Intel

 

[MidnightDistort]

SpinRite might sound expensive and it might be cheaper to just buy a new hard drive but the program does increase your hard drives reliability by refreshing the disk surfaces. It might be possible that the drive would go bad from this. I generally use it on older drives that generally has had issues or i get a used drive from somewhere. I personally think it's worth the money.

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

Anyway if you have bad blocks i'd run chkdsk first but generally like others have said it just checks the system for errors, doesn't do anything for the hard drive itself.