Bad hard drive sectors




What can I do about bad sectors in my hard drive?

Bad sectors are unrecoverable errors in the physical media of the hard disk. They can be detected via Scandisk using the thorough scan option. To prevent it:
- Don't move or tilt the computer while it is turned on because the hard disk head might come in contact with the disk. While it is turned off, the head will be parked in a secure position.
- Most of the bad sectors come from normal wear. If you leave your computer on for long hours and the PC is energy star compliant, you can set the hard disk to power off automatically after a certain idle time. This is a feature of the BIOS, not your operating system.
- While formatting the drive, use the option format <drive>: /c. This will test whether sectors marked "bad" are really media defects. Sometimes they could be corruption in the File Allocation Table. This option will not detect bad sectors not yet marked.

Category: Digital Helpline, Hardware
Issue: Nov 1996
Pages: 184

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