Bad sectors

[SiM]

One of my hard drive has bad sectors according to chkdsk (the maxtor, lol). I have backed up my data. There is nothing really important on there now so:
1) Is the hard drive permanently screwed?
2) Can I do anything about it?
3) Can I format it?
4) Is it safe to still use or can I lose everything on it at any moment?
5) Anyone wanna buy it of me?
6) Why me?
7) I hate maxtor.
8) I hate bad sectors.
9) Why do good sectors turn bad?

Any comments or advice for me please?

[aidanjt]

a) hit it with a hammer several times, or b) RMA it to Maxtor and get another few months from the returned disk.

I personally prefer 'a'. It's a lot more fun and good for venting.

Once bad sectors start appearing on a disk it's usually a cascade of failures thereafter.

[SiM]

Dammit, I think its out of warranty, its 3 years old... Well I suppose that quite a long life for a maxtor...

I think I'll bury it next to my goldfish and my old graphics card after trying out your hammer idea

Or is is immoral to ebay it? I will of course say its got a teeny weeny evil sector in the auction.

[MadduckUK]

I think I'll bury it next to my goldfish and my old graphics card

[SiM]

Long story involving water cooling a graphics card the wrong way. Lesson of the day: do not use a fish tank to watercool...

[arthurleung]

If you ran "chkdsk /f" it should have marked the bad sectors as bad and not use them.

On my server there are 2 Maxtors with a fair bit of bad sectors but still going strong (i think). It was over a year since I found out they have bad sector and it was fine.

Once it start bad-sectoring it is just pot luck if it is still decaying or not. Mine certainly decay at a very slow rate. Use it until it dies permanently

My experience was:
Maxtor will die slowly -> Bad sector / Odd noise "warnings"
Western Digital die instantly -> Bad Motor or PCB / No spinning

So when I have a bad Maxtor drive, I get enough warnings to get the data off them. Since I always have free space equal to my biggest drive, I could always just shift the data and RMA

I was not as fortunate when dealing with WD harddrives, they just die without warning and I didn't even have chance to pull the data off.

[SiM]

Thanks arthur, I did it with /f and /r...

Now that I have moved everything to another drive should I format it to start again or just delete everything?

ps: sorry everyone, I should stop spamming my own threads with bad jokes that no one except me finds funny...

[staffsMike]

I'm laughing on the inside..

[03peacheym]

Id go with the hammer idea. Great fun

[SiM]

Ok, update...

After trying a long format (and then exiting due to impatience), then trying a quick format (which worked) and then doing chkdsk /f/r again, I now see

 160071628 KB total disk space.
        20 KB in 2 files.
         4 KB in 9 indexes.
    569600 KB in bad sectors.
     70880 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
 159431124 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
  40017907 total allocation units on disk.
  39857781 allocation units available on disk.

Not looking good... there used to be about ~4000kb in bad sectors.


So it looks like the bad sector has recruited some good sectors to the dark side.

Anyone want a free hard drive? (Just pay postage)
Otherwise its hammer time.