Hi all,

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

sorry for the long post and shall be grateful for all inputs.

wishing all a very good day---Venkat

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