My Presario has two 75gig hard drives. Unfortunately, the boot drive contains 3 bad clusters. Chkdsk (thorough surface check),Norton's DD and Speeddisk freeze at the first bad cluster, make a rapid 'clicking' noise for about 30 seconds (similar to a problem from an earlier post), then restart themselves from the beginning. I recently upgraded to XP and am considering converting to NTFS (for reasons other than the bad clusters). Questions: Instead of using convert.exe to implement NTFS, will a low level format of the bad drive eliminate the bad clusters? Is the drive worth keeping, or should I look to replace it? I've been able to get a good, complete backup of the drive to DVD. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
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Bad clusters 1
- Thread starter mmumford
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Low level will probably be a temporary fix only.
One alternate is to use partition magic (think latest will handle your requirements) and resize the partition to bypass the bad sectors.
But if you do this and start getting more, it will be time to replace the drive.
Are you still in warranty? If doing temp repair runs you out of warranty, you haven't done yourself any favors. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
One alternate is to use partition magic (think latest will handle your requirements) and resize the partition to bypass the bad sectors.
But if you do this and start getting more, it will be time to replace the drive.
Are you still in warranty? If doing temp repair runs you out of warranty, you haven't done yourself any favors. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
- Thread starter
- #3
Thanks for the quick response. I'm not real familiar with partitioning, so I have one more question. If I partition the drive to isolate the bad clusters, (and they happened to be physically close to each other about 10 gigs from the beginning of the drive), will I end up with three partitions for that drive... one before the bad clusters, one containing the bad clusters, and one after the bad clusters? Or is there a way to put the bad sectors in one partition, with the rest of the drive in a second.
Thanks again for your assistance.
Thanks again for your assistance.
You can do it either way. You mark the active partition. Or you could make 2 partitions, one from the bottom and one from the top and leave unpartitioned space in the middle. But it takes more steps to get it this way. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
efair@atlnet.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.
Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.
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