Bad block on HD

Ginger

Did my usual Sunday evening maintainence plan on the PC..

I have my "My Documents" folder on a seperate disk so I dont have to move it any time I format the machine. Noticed in the event log when I was doing the AV scan that I was getting a bad block on DEVICE\HardDisk4\D which working back is the Disk 4 in Disk management which is where the My Docs folder amongst many other things resides.

Narrowed it down to 1 folder, which seems to fine except you cant view the JPGs stored in it. Guessing that the folder got corrupted in some way. Ran chkdsk in Safe mode and machine rebooted I am guessing when it got to that folder.

So how to fix is the question. I am thinking I might just move the whole my docs folder excluding the corrupt one to another disk for the moment and then see if I can sort this out.

Is the HDD on the last legs or is it case that there just that area thats now bogus..

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.

Capt'n Midnight

http://www.hdtune.com for a quick utility to check the drive, check the BIOS has smart reporting on if it is an option

Real bad blocks are usually remapped on the fly by the IDE/SATA drive itself, they have about 1% spare. So when you see them it's either the OS getting confused and mis-marking a block OR the drive has run out of spare sectors to swap over, which is not good news.

Backup, Backup, Backup

Ginger

Seems I have 1 bad block on Disk 4 from the SMART stats

There is 23GB free on a 279GB disk... I will move all the data off it tomorrow to the 1 of the 2 new 500GB ones that are coming in the morning. Seems to be just the one block then...

Can I fix it or whats the dealy??

Ginger

Did a full scan.. 1 damaged block on the whole disk.. Can these be fixed with a full format once the disk has been moved to another one???

mukki

Ginger wrote:

Did a full scan.. 1 damaged block on the whole disk.. Can these be fixed with a full format once the disk has been moved to another one???

a format will hide it,
but if ya have one, more will follow,


drive cant be too old if its 300gig, maybe you can get it changed on the warrenty

Soundman

Format won't fix it. You need to do a chkdsk /r on the drive.
If your drive is out of warranty and you want to try to repair it then try this below.

Make sure any important data is saved elsewhere before doing any of the solution below!


Go to run
Enter cmd and hit enter
Type in "chkdsk E: /r" (without the quote marks, replacing E with your drive letter)
Let it run.

On a 300GB drive this could be from 1 hour to +24 hours in severe cases depending on how bad the error is and how many are actually present.

Once done do:
1) Some form of sophisticated scandisk on the drive such as Norton, O&O Defrag (for surface evaluation) or SpinRite
2) Quick format of the drive
3) Full format on the drive just for good measure and this will hopefully sort the problem. It is quite possible that the error will return but this is a better way of hopefully repairing the disk surface.

If you really want to make sure it's ok and have the time then try to throw as many files on it as possible when done and then delete them off to see if you get any errors.

Best of luck.

Ginger

Think the disk was bought in 2005 .. Whats the warranty on these things..

Mac daddy

Depends on the vendor, my disks all have 3 years best thing you can do is check the top of the disk for the serial number and grab the product number as well, and check whoever made it there website.

But no format will only hide it for the moment, you need to repair it plenty of offline free hdd repair utility's available just have a google.

Ginger

DiamondMax 10 by Maxtor.. Bare drive rather than retail so seems to be 3 years

Have to talk to Komplett first

Soundman

Ginger wrote:

DiamondMax 10 by Maxtor.. Bare drive rather than retail so seems to be 3 years

Have to talk to Komplett first

Cool. Find out about the warranty first and if no joy then try my solution. It does take time but I have repaired a few HDD's with it. Some though just refuse to be repaired due to the problem being too severe.

Ginger

Need to sort that out.. but I have transferred from the 300GB to another spare disk... Sometimes its handy having over 2TB of space when things like this happen

mukki

Ginger wrote:

DiamondMax 10 by Maxtor.. Bare drive rather than retail so seems to be 3 years

Have to talk to Komplett first

how come its always maxtor drives that cause problems on here?


if they replace the drive, sell it on ebay and buy a seagate, WD or samsung