Hello all,

This may be a PC Soft question, but it was sent it back with a request to resubmit to PCBuild.

Can software cause Bad Sector errors on your HDD, that cannot be fixed by Scandisk, BUT CAN  be fixed by reformatting your HDD?

My system in AMD Duron 1.3G, MSI Kle Motherboard VGA SND LAN, Western Digital HDD 20 G 5400rpm, 256 MB PC133 RAM, running Win98SE.

This problem has occured before. The computer slowed and started throwing up warnings about bad sectors, and insisting on running Scan disk every startup. Scan disk took over 30 hours and showed several bad sectors, that could not be repaired.

Because the computer was only 6 months old the first time, I took it back to the shop, where they formatted the drive, ran Scandisk with no errors then reinstalled the OS. 

I ran scandisk on the computers return and then weekly with no problems until now.

Suddenly, I am getting the bad sector warnings again.
The last software I installed was the Deskmates Demos by Oska.

If the problems are caused by software, would it help if I partitioned the HDD? Then I wouldn't have to format the whole HDD, just the partition affected?? maybe?? Or doesn't it work that way?

Thank you for your patience

Anne Smith
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