fdisk/bad sectors

[phungilax]

does fdisk get rid of bad sectors. i'm gonna a new hard drive anyways, but if i can get rid of the bad sectors on this one, it would be nice. thanks for the info

[Johan]

No but reformatting may...but they could always come back.

[Maddman]

depends on why they went bad in the first place. If it is because of physical damage to the platter then it will never go away. if other wise then maybe. It is a gamble but nothing lost for trying.

[Jon]

As Maddman states, physical damage will cause it to only get worse and there isn't much you can do. The drive will die in time. Bad sectors are usually caused by physical damage...in other cases it is just corrupted areas of the disk. Hard head parks and/or disk crashes can cause them as can magnetic fields.

Otherwise, FDISKing will mark bad sectors and cause a reformat to "skip" over them after verifying drive integrity. This will cause you to lose some disk space and your disk will appear to have "holes" in it which are these bad sectors. This affects performance in that the OS will have to skip over these bad sectors constantly in order to avoid them. Usually results in instability as well.

Bad sectors also usually begin to multiply...they are like cancer in a sense.

[krm197]

This is definitely not a pleasant thing to be going through, as I'm am experiencing it first hand :(

Can't do much of anything in windows without pauses every now and again, and every time I run a defrag, the bad sectors keep multiplying. (I knew kicking the computer would cause problems in the future :p )

Oh well, the hard drive is about 3-4 years old now, and running at 5400 rpms, so gives me an excuse to get a new one.