Drive errors reported

[juliaatpcgp]

I have been helping a friend with her laptop.

Windows XP Home crashed regularly, often after I tried to plug in a USB device and it would not shut down (it just ignored the command) so I had to power down in order to get it going again. I know that's risky but there was no choice!

Each time this happened, Scandisk was running before Windows started and it found a few bad sectors (no more than 382KB).

I did a Windows XP "Repair" and now the PC runs perfectly and doesn't crash at all. The USB component of Windows is working fine allowing me to plug a drive in to backup the files.

I was wondering if those bad sectors are anything to worry about if everything seems to be working fine ?

If I were to format the drive and reinstall Windows and all her programs, is it possible for the drive errors to disappear - by which I mean is it possible that the crashes before caused the errors to be reported rather than a physical problem with those sections of the disk ?

I also installed a number of hard drive monitoring programs and 2 of them reported a low number next to "Spin Up Retry Time", one of them said the threshold was 30 and reported that was outside correct limits and the other 50 and reported it was WITHIN correct limits. I can find nothing on the web to tell me which is correct - can you tell me ?

To be on the safe side, I have set up an automatic backup of her files every week (she doesn't work on it that often) and reminded her to keep this up because these errors could be an early sign of failure.

But I'd really like to know if I'm worrying over nothing ....

Regards,
Jay

 

[stduc]

XP will have marked those sectors as bad, so they won't be used.

The worry is that the HDD is heading for the great laptop in the sky.

Re-formatting and loading XP will not help.

If you can afford it, I suggest you download and run spinrite from grc.com - it will checkout the drive thoroughly and give you an idea of whether it is healthy or not. It will also find and spare any other dodgy sectors on the drive before they cause problems.

 

[firewolfrl]

Spinrite runs a LOOOOONG time....especially when the settings are set for recover

I had a drive run for almost 23 hours for it to finish...it definitely fix the drive though

other than the time it takes I believe spinrite is one of the best for the type of program it is


get a new drive and clone or start fresh with your data....

drives die at the time you most need them not too

I had a client with the same symptoms you described that did backup his data....then went to a conference and the drive locked up in the middle of his presentation and died

his backup data was in Washington state ....his conference was in Florida....

so get a new drive I say again