bad hdd sectors

[trapper]

im curious to know if the following makes sense ...........

i found a couple of bad sectors on my slave hdd(1.6 gig) and was wondering what actually causes these bad areas and as i imagine its only data can it be fixed?
does it cause physical damage?
i partitioned the bad sectors at the end of the disk and hid the partition is this ok to do?
Should i just bin it incase it somehow does sumfink to my main drive?
TIA trapper;)

[jbell]

i think when it goes bad it is gone... windows knows how to ignore the sectors..... it just treats it like unmovable information - like when you defrag... that cluster will show up red.


...with my experience when you get a bad sector - its gone.

[Smizack]

I've recovered one or two bad clusters with Norton, but it takes forever to go through recovering, and it dosen't always work. You might be in a downward spiral with your hdd, I'd start backing up if I were you.

[JigPu]

A bad sector can be actual physical damage to the platters. It can happen by something hitting the sector and destroying the magnetic medium, or by some other method. Windows considers a sector 'bad' when it can no longer read from that sector. It might be physical damage (most likely), or it could be that the magnatism holding the data has degraded (almost garunteed not to be). You can run scandisk, but it only detects the bad sectors, and refuses to even try to recover the data.

Check out Spinrite. I haven't been to their site in a while, but their sofware is supposed to be one of the best at recovering data off a bad sector.

JigPu