Bad Clusters

[pinnochio]

Storage 3.2 HDrive suddenly showed bad clusters, so much
that windows would announce this upon start up every time
and try to run scandisk. Replace drive, but my question is
just how related are 'bad clusters' and 'bad sectors' ???
Surface scan showed 2, then after fix, showed 1 bad cluster.

Curious,
-P

 

[edfair]

clusters are made up of sectors. So very related.

Because the OS can't address all the sectors in large hard drives they are addressed in groups. It is done in such a way to reduce as much as possible the unused space. Large hard drives might contain clusters in the 8, 16 or 32 ib range.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[cdogg]

Yes, as soon as a enough sectors within the same cluster go bad, the entire cluster is labeled that way by the file system.

Usually when you start seeing more than a few sectors going bad, that's a sign that the hard drive is about to go. The head isn't moving quite right and is damaging data stored on one or more platters. Sometimes you can repair them temporarily by doing a format, but if they keep coming back, eventually it will become permanent with more damage to follow.


~cdogg
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[pweegar]

If your running Win2K or XP Pro, opena command prompt and type: chkdsk c: /f (or what ever drive is giving you problems). Then reboot. CHKDSK, MAY fix those(lock out) any bad sectors it finds.

 

[ceh4702]

You could tell us what kind of drive it is. There have been a lot of problems with some IBM Deskstars. And a few other models intermittently. Moving a computer around can also damage a hard drive.

Sometimes if you have a power supply with not enough watts the hard drive can get damaged due to drops in the available power at critical times. When you turn on a computer and all the drives spin up initially, the drives use more power.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.