2006-11-07 12:52:55 · 3 answers · asked by ivy 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Scanners
The hard drive Mfg. (i.e. Seagate, Maxtor, Hitachi, etc.) has drive utilities available for (free) download. I have worked on many computers and most of the time the Mfgrs. software was able to safely move the data from the bad sector into a good portion of the drive.
This is why a hard drive may say 160GB. and show on the computers operating system as 149GB. This space is set aside specifically for this purpose.
just go to the Mfgrs. website look in "support" for their diagnostic utility.
2006-11-07 13:08:14 · answer #1 · answered by yu.gota.go 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Win98 - if the bad sectors don't increase then you just got a few bad ones and can ignore them. If the bad sectors increase each time you run scandisk then it is time to buy a new drive.
WinXp - there is no scandisk as such. You have to run chkdsk. Other than that the same info as above applies except you have to watch it during the boot process. If you are continually getting a message that files had to be moved, it is time to replace the drive. IDE drives generally don't have bad sectors reported unless they were either not formatted properly (unusual), had a momentary glitch like a brown out or are starting to fail (unlike the old MFM and RLL drives).
2006-11-09 13:59:53 · answer #2 · answered by smgray99 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Normally, the scandsk.exe file contains it's own ways of not only "finding" bad sectors, but "moving" the data in that area to a better location on the hard drive, then "flagging" the bad area so that the system will not attempt to place info into that area again. It's processes are not always seen in action which is probably a good thing, seeing what it's really doing in the background would be a bit too confusing on people, lol. Larry RadioShack.
2006-11-07 20:58:03 · answer #3 · answered by dumbbutt4321 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋