Bad Sectors

[Guest]

What causes bad sectors on the hard disk and can they really be repaired without reformating the drive.

 

[Crashman]

You can have "fake" bad sectors due to a bios issue, not likely but I have seen it happen. They dissappear when you have the drive set properly in BIOS and repartition it. For real bad sectors, there is damage to the magnetic material on the disk surface and it can't be fixed.

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Guest]

I would have agreed with you dude, But I had some bad sectors on a 4.3G Quantum I had, but when I slated the drive the slate programme removed all the partitions and data, it removed the bad sector too, I thought it may have just removed the flag, but no it took the bad sector too

 

[Crashman]

But those were not "real" bad sectors, only mismarked that way. I should say the only way you can be totally sure if those sectors are really bad or not is to repartition the drive, then format it. If the bad sectors remain, they were really there. If not, a glitch caused them to be misread as bad when they were not. I see false bad sectors sometimes. If you repartition the drive and format it, and bad sectors are still there, it is a sign that part of the magnetic material has gone bad, most likely from a physically damaged surface, be that from shock (head hits the platter) static discharge (I have seen burn marks on some platters when I dissassebled bad drives) or material flaking (usually caused by heat I think).

Suicide is painless...........

 

[Guest]

I would say then that the majority of them would be psuedo bad sectors then, as bad sectors are a lot more common than physically damaged disks, I had never removed one in that way before.

Everybodys entitled to my opinion