How to fix a bad sector on hard disk? (1 Viewer)

[teapot2001]

I have a few bad sectors on the hard drive and have run Scan Disk on it. However, when I transfer video from my digital camcorder to the hard drive, about 20 minutes into the transfer it writes to a bad sector, which causes the transfer to abort. When I run Scan Disk in DOS, it clearly has all the bad sectors marked, which have stayed the same over the past few years. I thought the marking of bad sectors would prevent any writes to be done on them?

~T

 

[Kevin P]

Run a scandisk with the option to do a surface scan for errors. You might have bad sectors that haven't been flagged (yet). A regular scandisk without the surface scan won't look for or flag bad sectors.

If sectors are going bad, you should back up your data and replace the drive ASAP. One or two new bad sectors should be OK, but if a bunch are going bad, or new ones are found everytime you scan, the drive is going.

Running a defrag should help things too, if you're storing large video files.

KJP

 

[Tekara]

can't fix a bad sector, can only have the comptuer not recognize it as a usable area. as previously suggested a surface scan in scan disk will do this. typically bad sectors are like a virus, they do tend to spread and grow over time until most of your hardrive is bad.

 

[teapot2001]

I've run surface scan several times since I encountered the problem, and there are still only 3 blocks that are marked with a "B." I've had these 3 bad blocks for 2-3 years now. I've defragmented my hard drive before the capture, and the problem still exists. Every time it encounters the problem, I am forced to run surface scan when I restart my computer, but as I said previously, the same 3 blocks are marked bad.

Is there another program I can use to check for bad sectors?

~T

 

[Ken Chan]

SpinRite

//Ken

 

[Ted Lee]

If sectors are going bad, you should back up your data and replace the drive ASAP

my thoughts exactly. heck, you can get a speedy western digital hd (80g/8mb buffer) for under a hundred bucks now.