How Many Bad Clusters are Normal

[deejay33]

Hello All,

Reciently one of my users came in and booted their system and their system did some type of rebuild. During this rebuild, Windows found about a dozen files on bad clusters and moved them. To be on the safe side I decided to run a disk check on the hard drive to make sure that there were no problems. This time it only found one file that was on a bad cluster and moved it. About a week later I re-ran disk check and again found one file on a bad cluster.

I have been reading on different forums and many people say that having some bad clusters is normal but it is when you start to get more and more is when you should be worried. Does getting one more bad cluster each time I run check disk qualify as getting worse? Should the check disk come up clean if I had run it only a week before? This system is running Windows 2000 SP3 and is using the FAT 32 file system.

Thanks for any help,
DeeJay

 

[SkipCox]

You have a good handle on the situation. Disks with bad sectors are common and if I see that number constantly increasing, I'm gonna replace the drive. If the number of bad sectors remains about the same, I just continue to watch the drive.

If you feel uncomfortable with the trend the drive is taking, replace it and press it into service as a storage drive for files and downloads that are easy to replace.

Skip

http://home.comcast.net/~scox9/index.html

 

[SYAR2003]

I suggest you monitor it with SMART for a while.
If bad clusters increase there is definitly a problem
with the drive.
Active smart from ariolic.com is trial for 30days
and is quit good .

syar

 

[Itsmillertime777]

What exactly causes the bad clusters? imperfections on the hdd disk?

_______________________________________
What are you reading this for the answer is up there ^^^

 

[hotfusion]

Yes, or the heads striking the disc surface, which should normally never happen.
I consider seeing bad clusters as a bad sign. It means the drive has already used up its pool of 'spare sectors' and now errors are beginning to show.
Get any important data off while it's still readable.