[GLLUG] Off Topic Hard Drive Question

[Matt Graham]

On Tuesday 30 March 2004 13:13, after a long battle with technology, 
Mark Tarquini wrote:
> 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?

You Mean "bad sectors".  Anyway, you can do this, but given modern SMART 
tech and bad-sector remapping in hard drives, by the time you start 
seeing bad sectors, your disk is mostly toast.  Any repartitioning to 
get around the bad sectors will be a temporary solution at best, since 
the number of bad sectors on the disk will only grow as time goes on 
and the placement of the new bad sectors will be effectively random.

> The problem I'm running into is that Windows ME cannot copy it's
> setup files to the HD when I run setup. Windows 2000 and XP completely 
> lock up at random times. 

LoseME?  Ack.  Anyway, I'd suggest replacing the drive.  Even 2.5" 
drives are getting cheaper than ever.

> will windows still try to read those bad clusters even if they are 
> unused partitions without a file system on them?

'Doze won't read the bad sectors if they're not in a partition that 
'Doze recognizes.  If new bad sectors pop up within a partition that 
'Doze is using, you'll get problems.

-- 
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