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Posted

Hello,

I had some issues yesterday - I tried to do a backup to an external USB drive which failed with read errors.

Then I did a CHKDSK which reported about 5 bad clusters on the whole HD and fixed them (marked as bad, I assume). After this, I was able to make a full backup using Ghost.

The question is - should I replace this hard drive now? Is it going to fail soon? I have read other's accounts on the web, and most people seem to agree that once Windows is able to detect bad clusters, the hard disk is about do die. That's because hard disks have a built-in automatic check that will prevent the operating system from ever seeing bad (physical) clusters.

Anybody have experience with this? I have had two hard drives die before and both had bad clusters before dying but ... I am kind of hoping it might be harmless, maybe caused by a crash or something.

Then again, there were some other oddities involving the HD recently - the Acer gravisense software which is supposed to park the drive when detecting sudden motions crashed out with 100% CPU for the first time since I have this machine (1 year). Never had a problem with this before.

And HDTune - which works again after the CHKDSK run - reports minimum speeds of .5MB/s which seems very low.

What's your opinion? Do I need a new HD?

Posted

Backup and reformat if it's possible. If the bad clusters still exist then it's physical damage to the drive and you need to replace it.

If you have a utility like Spinrite it may be able to repair the damage (if its not physical) without a full format, which would save the data.

Posted

If you value your data replace the drive. I have seen systems run fine for over a year after bad clusters are detected. More often the systems fail at the most inopportune time.

If data integrity is critical back it up and replace it.

If cost is critical back it up routinely and replace it when it dies. (I never choose this option, my data is much more important than the peanuts it costs to replace the drive) Each person has their own criteria though.

Posted

Yep,

best advice is to replace. Bad clusters are mostly the indication of a soon to fail drive!

If you intend to keep on using it, a daily back-up is in order unless the data on it is not very important...

Posted
Yep,

best advice is to replace. Bad clusters are mostly the indication of a soon to fail drive!

If you intend to keep on using it, a daily back-up is in order unless the data on it is not very important...

Advice taken, will replace the drive ASAP. Notebook drives are really cheap these days.

I will just use an external enclosure, copy the drive over with Ghost, then swap them out.

Tx guys...

Posted

If the machine is under guarantee get it straight back to the service centre and get the disk replaced.

You can recover the data from the old disk, by putting it in an external case, connected by USB.

Posted

Ok the issue is resolved. Thanks again for your help.

I bought a 160GB disk for 4500 Baht and installed it.

Service center was closed over weekend, I am going to try my luck later when it's open - the disk has a 5 year warranty from Seagate so I don't expect them to give me any trouble. I found more read errors using HDTune and then Firefox suddenly lost all settings so I wanted to ditch this disk _today_. Besides, most of the work involved was saving the data + the service center does not help with that. As I know from previous experience.

I had a full ghost backup and with the ghost startup disk recovery was no problem. Or would have been no problem if it wasn't for Vista's bootloader. Turns out the new boot loader has many hard references to volume ids - I assume it didn't match up because my old disk had a hidden recovery partition whereas the new one doesn't [in hindsight, that's perfectly clear... ].

In any case, the machine would present the boot menu for Vista and XP, then die when selecting either choice. It took me a long time but I eventually figured out that the Vista install disk is able to repair the vista boot option - sadly, it didn't repair the XP boot option so I had to dig deeper to do that and use the bcdedit command in vista to repair the XP boot myself. Then boot.ini also had hard references to volume# so a funny thing happened - XP started up using the Vista/Windows directory on the D: partition. It ended in a black screen - a total hang without even an error message. After correcting boot.ini, everything is working now. And I have a rather intimate understanding of the Vista boot process - more detail than I wanted to know, but OK at least things are back up and running :o

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