Computer Issues

[MilitiaSniper]

My computer is stating I have bad secotor on my drive/s.
What can I do to repair it?
Without sending it the shop.
Sincerely, MilitiaSniper

PS. Happy New Year!

[Mr_Tea]

Me think´s the most important thing to do right now is, make a backup of all data that you don`t want to loose.
If the drive is a seagate, than you should download their disc wizard to test your drive.

[Mr Burns]

i guess your ´puter wants it´s ofp back

nah j/k, backing up sounds like a good idea !

[der bastler]

My computer is stating I have bad secotor on my drive/s.
What can I do to repair it?
Without sending it the shop.

Who is stating, your BIOS or your OS? If it is the BIOS: repair is futile. Make backup resp. an image of your system, buy a new hdd and copy your data to it.

Had this issue during my internship... Morning, I enter the office, switch on my computer, oh, hello Dell BIOS, what? detected bad sectors, make backup? Uh, ok. Copied essential data (mdl, m, tex, pdf) to the net home, called IT department, got a new PC next day (they did a roll out of new hardware so that was "luck").

[MilitiaSniper]

Everythime I re-start, my Scandisk states I have bad sectors.
Sincerely, MilitiaSniper

[Sanctuary]

Try to scan your hard drive with an up-to-date antivirus, to see if those messages are not caused by some virus running in the background and killing some HD sectors or clusters.

If there is no virus at all... as it was already suggested i strongly advice you to backup everything you can if the bad sectors message continue to occur at your system startup.

I had the bad luck to encounter those messages at startup with my previous hard drive (the HD worked for several years before going into this) , and all i could do at the end was to notice that whatever i did , it was only temporary fix.
It will only become worse to the point your hard drive will be better in a trash can than in your computer

So backup what you can and prepare to buy another hard drive if you have no virus.

[der bastler]

Everythime I re-start, my Scandisk states I have bad sectors.
Sincerely, MilitiaSniper

MS Scandisk? Blue, text mode?


I meant the mainboard bios.

All recent hdds and mainboards have a System called SMART (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki....hnology) Normally, a fresh hdd from the factory already has bad sectors (production tolerances, e.g. damage to the platter, small failure during surface manufacturing), but the hdd's internal controller masks them. The hdd's controller is also capable of masking additional bad sectors that occur in its lifetime (wear-and-tear, temperature...). If the number of masked sectors gets too high, SMART issues a warning at the very beginning of the boot sequence. A rising number of bad sectors is --in most cases-- a sure sign of imminent hdd death (perhaps a particle from a micro fracture is traveling over the platter surface *screech*).

[BraTTy]

Good explanation.Correct that if your IDE hd has developed bad sectors , it is on its way out.
Best thing for now is a reformat because it will mark the bad sectors and prevent trying to use them again.Some utilities can do this without losing your data (format will lose all data)

[der bastler]

It is generally a good idea ™ to make backups at regular intervals.

I do this by writing the contents of /home to a DVD+RW. Only flaw: I have to keep my /home smaller than 4.4 GB.
The /home directories of other computers can be mounted and burned to a DVD+RW over ethernet, so there is no excuse for poor bastler not to do a weekly backup session...