You really can't "remove" a bad sector. They are permanent. All you can do is mark the sector as "bad" so the operating system will ignore it when writing to the disk.
Scandisk and most other disk repair utilities will do this for you. You just have to remember to run the utility on a regular basis.
Alt255@Vorpalcom.Intranets.com
"What this country needs is more free speech worth listening to."[tt]
Hansell B. Duckett[/tt]
Just to add a forethought that doesn't become an hindsight nightmare:
If I were you, I would make sure you start backing up any data you don't want to lose in the future. The hard drive could last a long time after marking the bad sectors or it could be the beginning of a hard drive breakdown. In any event, if you have files you don't want to lose making backups is not a bad idea anyway!
Lori ggebhart@clover.net
I hope I never get too old or arrogant to learn something new!
I have used the lastest version of TuffTest to low level format a hard disk with bad sectors. What this will do is to de-assign the sectors that are bad and substitute reserve sectors for the bad ones. After the low level format ScanDisk will no longer report bad sectors. This is fine if you have an anomolus bad sector. But if this is the beginning of drive failure, bad sectors will reappear quickly. If this is the case, trash the drive, it won't be worth the agro.
Having said this I would reiterate lgebhart's sage advice Backup!! Also keep in mind that lowlevel formatting is totally destructive, so you will have to save anything on the drive that you want to keep.
I had such a 'break down drive'. The operating system got problems so I ran scandisk. It found 'some' bad blocks.
Then i kept on using the computer, but only a week after, more errors developed. So i decided to not take backup but simply STOP using the computer! Then i got a new drive immediately, booted on that and copied the data.
I stored the bad drive as backup, but after using it only 2-3 times it died totally!
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