"phantom" bad sectors

[malepipe]

Running XP on a dual boot/dual drive set up.ME on my old drive and XP on the new (allegedly faulty) one.I can scandisk from XP or Win ME and come up fine. Including an extended scan. I run Norton utilities and get the same thing BUT...
If I try to defrag from any of them I get a "bad sector" message suggesting I run scandisk to repair them.I wrote maxtor and they directed me to use their diag disk and it said the drive had an error and to contact Maxtor.The thing I dont get is it certainly dosent ACT like a bad drive and I have no problems sans trying to run defrag.This drive is whisper quiet and has blazing read/write speeds(its also brand new BTW).I can move data around the partitions and it runs XP all day long with no trouble.Also I have no errors on the storage partition of this same drive
What the heck is going on here??
Any ideas on this?
Jimi_l(AKA Malepipe)

 

[MisterZuzu]

This may or may not help. There are two types of format - low level and high level.

A low level format is done at drive level by a utility usually written by the manufacturer - Maxtor in this case. If it finds bad sectors, it maps around the entire track at the drive level and the operating system(s) never see them. We used to have a lot of these and the manufacturer even printed a "bad track table" and stuck it on the outside of the drive. Nowadays, drives are generally "perfect." If we find a bad sector at the drive level, we assume there are more to come and junk the drive.

A high level format is done at partition level by a program such as format.exe. If it finds bad sectors, it maps around them using a different method but it does not look at the entire drive - it only looks at the part it intends to use, the partition.

What does that have to do with you? I'm not sure. It could be that:
1. the flaws being found by Maxtor diagnostics are not in your partition, or
2. the low-level mapping is making the flaws unseeable by scandisk.
Neither explains why defrag seems to find the flaw. It shouldn't. I know this doesn't answer your question but perhaps it sheds some light on it.

 

[malepipe]

Thanks,
I had read articles that suggested exactly what you just said previously.The whole thing is pretty weird.What I did was wipe the whole drive, partitions and all and started over.This time I put XP on the second partition of the drive and made the first storage.I no longer have any errors and can defrag it HOWEVER.
The Maxtor software still shows 2 bad sectors and says to return the drive for a replacement.The error number assigned to the problem seems to keep changing as well yet nothing else(including Norton's disk Dr.) seems to find these errors.
****AS FAR AS MAXTOR GOES****
It has been two weeks now and Maxtor dosent seem to want to talk about this anymore, nor have they offered a replacement as they first did. They simply stopped communicating with me no matter how many times I write.I am fairly disgusted with thier attitude and will NEVER buy another Maxtor drive(I have 2).Support is closed nights and weekends so I cannot call and they no longer return E-mails even though their own software says the drive is faulty!!