Bad Hard Drive?

[ck42866]

Ok, My Hard Drive reports bad sectors. (not too much). Should I throw it away now or do I have some time to play with it. I overclocked my computer sometime ago and I think that while playing with the FSB, I may have tweaked a little to much out my hard drive. Anyway, the bad sectors are always there and I really don't know how this effects me now or later down the road. I am thinking about buying a hard drive but won't if I have time. Any advice?

[This message has been edited by ck42866 (edited 09-22-99).]

[Susan]

Just my opinion...

Bad sectors aren't good, but they are not always a sign of the end, either. I had a Seagate years ago that would get a few more bad sectors every few months and it never really died.

If your drive is not under any warrantee, I would hang in there with it, but make sure you keep up-to-date backups.

If it's under warrantee, get an RMA.

[This message has been edited by Susan (edited 09-22-99).]

[ck42866]

So are you saying that I will get more bad sectors than I have now? I checked the drive with scan disk and it states I have 65,536 bytes that are in bad sectors but no more. It states otherwise is error free. What can I do to prolong the life of my drive. I know that 65,536 is really nothing in comparison to the entire drive but for piece of mind I'd like to do what I can to prolong it. Another thing, what does scan disk do to the bad sectors?

[Susan]

Scandisk marks a faulty location as 'bad' so it won't be used in the future.

There's really no way of telling whether or not your drive will continue to get the bad sectors and at what severity.

If you have received no new bad sectors since overclocking, maybe you're in the clear but you still need to monitor it and do backups.

If you see that additional bad sectors are occurring with frequency, then I would think about getting a new drive very soon.




[This message has been edited by Susan (edited 09-22-99).]