[mikapc]

I've noticed my hard drive making awful noises and hanging when I access this one file and when I get to one place in defrag. How do I identify where this bad block is and hopefully mark it off as no longer available to write to without deleting my entire partition and reformatting?

[mikapc]

Oh yes.. My hard drive is a 40gig IBM

[redduc900]

How do you know your HDD has a bad block? Without knowing anything about your system or which OS you're running, I'll assume you're using either XP or W2K...and you found an error in the Event Viewer log pertaining to the IBM HDD (an error something along the lines of "The device, \Device\Harddisk0\C, has a bad block." Bad sectors aren't "fixed"...they're simply marked as unusable areas on the drive. The problem is still there, however no data will be written to the bad blocks.

You could try scanning the disk using the latest IBM/Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (DFT), which I believe has a sector repair option. It apparently allows the recovery of sector(s) of the disk that have become corrupt, overwriting the corrupt sector(s) with zeroes. You can download the latest version of the DFT from the following Hitachi site...

http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

Normally, bad blocks are a sign of a drive that's failing. You should be able to get the drive exchanged if it's still under
warranty.

[mikapc]

yeah.. I ran that program in an attempt to correct the sector corruption but when it scans the drive and finally gets to the bad block my hard drive starts making strange noises and doesn't get any farther. Whenever any program seeks to the specific bad block my hard drive hangs so what program do I run that will mark the bad block as no longer readable. DFT tells me where it is. Is there anyway that I can manually tell the nfts system to no longer use that block?