Hard Disk Bad Sectors

[tricktx]

At the moment my hard drive is getting very full mainly due to my 7GB MP3 gallary, so i am looking for a new HDD, i dont have any money to spend but i have been offered a 15GB drive for £10 but it has 500MB of bad sectors on it. Is there a program or somthing i can do to make the bad sectors unusable because 11.5MB isnt going to make a difference atall, and it would help release space on my existing drive.

thanks
Richard

[BipolarBill]

Norton Disk Doctor will scan and mark the bad sectors. So will Scandisk. It takes some time to do this and you will still suffer a performance hit afterward anyway while the system dances around the marked sectors.

Bad sectors lead to more bad sectors anyway. This is a bad investment.

[otheos]

Stay away!

If you have absolutely no money then check www.ebuyer.com for some cheap conner drives.

[tricktx]

thanks for the replys guys i will stay away this time. I'll have a look on ebuyer and see if theres anything there.

Cheers
Richard

[fluffycow]

how can I find out how many bad sectors are on my disk? Do I have to acess the S.M.A.R.T. info? if so, does anyone know of a free program that can? Ive got a 4 year old 20 gig hd and I have a feeling its got a lot of bad sectors, but cant figure out how to measure them. Its been on like 14 hours a day, lol. Oh and by the way, I dont think getting a hard disk with 500 mb of bad sectors is a good idea. To get that many it had to be getting them pretty fast, so maybe something is wrong with the drive? plus the head would have to skip around them a bit.

[BipolarBill]

Just run a thorough Scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor with surface check and stand back.