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Thread: bad sectors on my harddrive

  1. #1
    mikeco's Avatar Rossco's Manager
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    im wanting to add a extra 20gb to the partition on my harddrive but when i try to do it with partition magic (also tryed disk director suite) it comes back with a error about bad sectors, rossco told me to do the chkdsk thing in cmd and comes back with this:


    anyone know how i can fix this?

    if i move all my stuff off the current partition and then delete it/format it and remake a partition could that fix it? (would like to know be4 trying it dont want to move around 30gb worth of stuff finding out it doesnt)

    edit:
    also tryed doing /f with chkdsk.

  2. Software & Hardware   -   #2
    Duffman's Avatar Poster
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    download or buy diskeeper, its worked wonders for me
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  3. Software & Hardware   -   #3
    lynx's Avatar .
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    All disks have bad sectors, and have some extra ones to compensate.

    Usually these are picked up at manufacturing time and the drive is programmed to spares instead. However, sometimes there are borderline sectors which weren't picked up, or new faults have developed. Usually this happens in the first few weeks of the drives life.

    When this happens Windows will mark the allocation unit which contains the bad sectors as bad, and will not use them. In your case, one allocation unit is affected, and it contains between 1 and 8 bad sectors.

    If you reformat the drive you remove these markers. If you perform a quick format then you have to wait until Windows uses those sectors before it (hopefully) notices they are bad, but as long as you do a full format then Windows will probably find them again straight away.

    The only way to permanently get rid of the bad sectors is to add them to the drive's internal bad sector table so that it can use some of the spares, but you need software from the drive manufacturer to do a low level format. Don't use low-level format software from any other source (including the bios) - it won't redefine any bad sectors and can alter the drive parameters making your drive slow or unusable.

    Word of warning though, the appearance of bad sectors in an older drive is often a sign that the drive is starting to fail.
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  4. Software & Hardware   -   #4
    mikeco's Avatar Rossco's Manager
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    so can i do a full format on the partition or does full formatmean i gotta clear the harddrive?

    right now im using the unlocated 20gb to make a partition so i can move everything off of the G partition and get it ready for formatting.

    edit:
    got it sorted, moved everything off the G partition, formated it using windows, deleted the partition then used partition magic to add the space to the 20gb partition i made.

    thanks hope it doesnt screw up
    Last edited by mikeco; 04-07-2006 at 04:16 PM.

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