[GLLUG] Off Topic Hard Drive Question

Jeremy Bowers jerf at jerf.org
Tue Mar 30 14:38:41 EST 2004


Mark Tarquini wrote:
> Question:
> 
> I have a laptop which I have determined has a hard drive with bad
> clusters on it.  Can I partition around the bad clusters and only use
> the partitions that do not have bad clusters?

Modern hard drives have error correction built into them, automatically 
and silently mapping bad sectors to good ones. Modern hard drives all 
reserve some sectors for just such a use when they are created.

If you're actually *seeing* bad sectors fail, then that means you are 
experiencing routine failures, and the failure is not merely "now 
starting", it is in full swing. You should consider this drive, and any 
data on it, already on borrowed time, with complete or catastrophic 
failure happening at any moment now.

Get the data you prize off the drive and replace it. The drive itself 
has pretty much done all the salvaging it can for you, you're pretty 
much already out of "slack".

(Now, if this is a much, much older drive, this doesn't apply. I'm not 
sure what the cutoff date for this logic is, but I'm pretty sure it's 
been this way for over a decade now; odds are it holds for your drive now.)

After that, if you want to putz with the drive, by all means feel free, 
but don't ever trust it again. ;-)


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