Generally, if you are finding problems with a hard drive, the best advice is 
to remove all the data on the drive that is important to you and put it 
somewhere else, such as another hard drive.  Unfortunately, it isn't really 
possible to predict whether the drive will continue to deteriorate or not, 
but I think that it is best to assume that it will.

I don't know of an easy way to move just the files that are already on 
damaged or otherwise inaccessible parts of the drive.  Gibson's SpinRite 
program is billed as being a good utility for trying to recover data from 
this difficult to read sectors.  As I understand it, the program makes 
repeated and slightly varied efforts to read the data and then move it to a 
good area of the drive.  Unfortunately, this program is not inexpensive, and 
I've never had an occasion where I needed to try to recover some particular 
data badly enough to justify the cost of using the program.

Bear in mind, that even with Spinrite, there is no guarantee that the drive 
will not eventually fail; so, the precaution of moving all the data you can 
from the problem drive, first, is still necessary.

Some drive manufacturers' utilities will offer to "repair" a drive, which 
seems to entail removing the bad sectors from service and replacing them 
unused "slack" space on the drive.  I'm not sure how hard the program will 
try to recover data from these areas first, presumably, not very, as it has 
already determined these areas to be unreadable.

If you have or can obtain a second drive large enough to move your data to, 
I would do that, and then I would write zeros to the whole drive.  After 
that I would run a thorough scan of the drive to see if appeared sound. 
Even then, assuming that it appears to be working, I would be a bit cautious 
about what I used the drive for, at least for a period of trial use.

I'm not sure why your system is slow to boot up.  It sounds like you are 
getting to Windows XP's boot menu, though I'm not clear exactly what you are 
describing seeing during the boot process.  It may be related to the fact 
that you have two bootable hard drives installed, now.  Usually, the 
preferred method of setting up a system this way is to have a system with 
Win98 already installed on one drive or partition and then install WinXP. 
WinXP will see the existing OS and then offer to "upgrade" or install WinXP 
to a different location.  This second choice will include WinXP installing a 
boot loader that will let you choose between OS to boot into at start up. 
At least, that is generally how I recall the process working.  I haven't 
tried it in quite a while and am a bit fuzzy on the details.  Hopefully, 
someone will correct me if I've got some point wrong or incomplete.

John Sproule

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Venkat Viswanathan" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2006 10:17 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] HDD-BAD SECTORS

> My seagate 40gb hdd has developed some bad sectors. I downloaded a utility 
> called "seatools" from seagate site and ran a thorough check. it listed a 
> series of bad sectors and tried to verify if there are any data sitting on 
> them. after the completion of the full test it showed that these sectors 
> were in "use" but the "path/file name" portion of the results showed as 
> "NA" (not available?)
>
> it also offered to write zeroes to these sectors with the help of the "in 
> built
> facility" of the HDD but warned that this step will render it incapable of 
> retrieving any data from these sectors if i want.
>
> My questions are:-
>
> (1) if i leave it as it is what are the chances that the entire HDD will 
> become useless in course of time because without knowing what is the data 
> in these sectors if I happen to delete this data for some reason then will 
> new data be written to these sectors which are bad?
>
> (2)is there a way to find out what data is in there so that i can do a 
> specific back up if need be? the utility lists the LBA nubers of all the 
> bad sectors.
>
> (3) if i opt for writing zeroes is there a way to format "only" those bad 
> sectors?
>
> additional info:--
>
> (1) the disk in question has win 98 se in it. (2) the bad sectors are in 
> the "c" drive. (3)currently i have hooked it up as "master" in secondary 
> ide channel with cdrom as "slave"  (3) I have put in a 10 gb western 
> digital hdd as "master" in the primary ide channel. no slave. this disk is 
> not new but reformatted in NTFS with a fresh install of xp pro sp2. (4)the 
> bad sector disk is fornatted in fat32. (5)the system is set to boot from 
> the western digital disk.
>
> by the way, it lingers during post for a full two minutes offering to 
> enter setup or from network and gets to the win xp "rolling cylinder" and 
> susequent boot up. is it because of 2 hdds? the installed ram is a total 
> of 512 mb of sdram. could this "low" ram be the cause for this lingering 
> during post?
> the mobo is intel desktop D845WN model

              The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech
                     support at our newest website:
                          http://freepctech.com