In a message dated 2/3/2004 2:31:46 AM Eastern Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
I have to agree on this one, but only because of personal experience.
I have a drive in a system which was reporting bad sectors. I didn't have a
drive handy to replace it, and so as a last resort, I ran Norton diskdoctor
on a thorough scan continuously for a couple of days. (I always say you can
break something that's already broken.)
I ended up formatting/reloading the o/s and running the scan again
continuously just to see what would happen.
Strangely enough, the bad sectors were gone, and haven't reappeared to this
day.
I'm assuming that the scans don't actually know the difference between
'physical' damage to the drive and 'software' damage. This seems the only
explaination.
All I know is that because it's worked for me, I won't condemn a drive which
shows bad sectors until I know for sure.
Michele Sayer



I installed a program (driver?) years ago that was SOOO bad
at writing to the hard drive that it actually made it chatter like a
woodpecker right away.
(Very similar to the clicking sound a drive makes when it will
not initialize -- spins up, chatters, and then shuts itself down..)

I went into safemode and got rid of that program real quick.
This was when 8.4G drives first came out, and THAT drive is
still working perfectly. You have to "see" this to believe it...

I have had programs that would write filenames with illegal
characters to a HD (usually as part of a "crash"), and then
nothing short of a miracle (or a disk editor) would erase those files...

Really bad software can (and does) cause problems that can
"look" really bad...

                                                   Rick Glazier
Hi,
  Drive makers include "spare" sectors, to replace sectors that go bad. That
is why the bad sectors "disappeared" when you did the thorough scandisk. It
found the bad sectors and marked them as such, and the disk replaced them with
spare sectors, so you didn't lose any disk capacity. (This works until you
exhaust the supply of "spare" sectors, but if you have that many bad sectors, the
drive is probably soon to be toast anyway.)

HTH,
Peter Hogan
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