Bad Clusters

ma hard drive has a few bad clusters, i imagine its still ok to use, its used as a slave drive. mostly for music. although all the bad clusters arent mraked as bad, when i run scandisk form dos its gets to cluster 141,187 and crashes, it finds no errors up till then, but a few bad clusters are marked in the same area so i am guessin theres more, also the same happens in windows, whe i run scandisk from there on a surface scan it gets to the same point and crashes.
also when i try to format to see if format will mark them as bad, it also crashes about the same point. 141,190. as it trys to reallocate file allocation or somethin.
so is there anything else i can do to fix it?

have you tried repartitioning?

yeah, deleted partion, created new primary dos.
i might try that again see if that picks them up.

Run killdisk on it a couple of times and then FDisk and low level format. I've never had a major problem with bad blocks or clusters aside from one drive that temporarily failed a recert (and I've played with some real old systems).
After I used killdisk on that drive it worked fine and recertified fine.

right, ive just downloaded killdisk, i'll run that a few times.
then delete all partions on the drive? and create a new primary dos?
then format? any command switches with the format?

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Originally posted by Livy@8 July 2003 - 11:04
right, ive just downloaded killdisk, i'll run that a few times.
then delete all partions on the drive? and create a new primary dos?
then format? any command switches with the format?

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not just any format. LOW LEVEL format... this can damage your HDD in the long run.

whats the diff fropm format and low level format? how would i low level format then?

After killdisk is done there won't be any thing left on the drive so no need to worry about old boot sectors or partitions. Just stick your win9x floppy disk in and use FDISK to create partitions and set one active. Reboot and use format c: /s to sys the drive and reformat. You only really need to format the first partition from dos. The rest you can do from inside your OS.

If you want to be thorough, run maxtors recerification on it or what ever utility is available for your drive. That will do a low level format.

It should now be like a brand new drive.