[GLLUG] Off Topic Hard Drive Question

Asenchi asenchi at asenchi.com
Tue Mar 30 15:45:26 EST 2004


On Tue, 30 Mar 2004 13:13:11 -0500
Mark Tarquini <mark at iametarq.com> 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?
>
>The problem I'm running into is that Windows ME cannot copy it's
>setup files to the HD when I run setup.  

It is highly recommended, from experience, that you DO NOT USE
Windows ME.  It is a poor quality, patched up version of Windows
98se that was meant to satisfy people's appetites until Windows
XP was release.

[snip]

>Eventually I will have to replace the hard drive, I assume, but
>in the mean time, will my idea be a sufficient work around or
>will windows still try to read those bad clusters even if they
>are unused partitions without a file system on them?

It really depends on where the bad clusters are.  If they are at
the tail end of the drive, you shouldn't have any problem until
you start filling up the disk.  However, NTFS and FAT32 are both
horrible at managing data.  This is why it is necessary to
'defrag' Windows formatted drives more often.  So these could
cause a problem in that respect.  

Playing with the idea that they clusters are at the end of the
disk, the drive should work well in a a firewall, which usually
needs a small amount of space, so it isn't really 'bad' as it is
'partially working'.  Of course I may be completely wrong on
this. :)

>Thanks a million.

You can deposit that in my bank account. :)

Good Luck,

Curt Micol


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