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Bad Block

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Hello everyone, I am new to this site. My Intro to Operating Systems instructor told me about this place. I ran Event Viewer and discovered a "Disk" error message. The details say " The device, \Device\Harddisk0\D, has a bad block." A tech friend informed me that once a block goes bad in a HD, it spreads like wildfire across the entire disk.:eek: I want to get a new HD, but have a quick question first. I have an ABS gaming computer from Magnell Associates. I was wondering if I would be able to reinstall the factory software on the new drive. The manual claims that as long as the BIOS hasn't been flashed, the software should recognize the computer as an ABS system. Any help or thoughts on the "Disk" error message would be helpful.
 
First, Welcome! Always nice to see new faces around.

The advice you were given is unfortunately 100% correct. A bad block on a HD means that an area of the drive has been damaged and can no longer be read. A more technical explanation is that a small part of the surface on a platter has worn out and can no longer magnetically hold a charge. Spread may not be the right term, but when one area wears out it's certain that more is to follow.

As far as a system restore, my experience is that replacing the HD should be no problem. HDs are so uniform that the restore software probably won't even know that it's not the original one in the machine.
 
I'd run a chkdsk /f and cross your fingers, its not GARUNTEED that more blocks will go south, but a drive that has bad sectors frequently is on the outs. Can be caused by things like incorrect height on the heads, which causes head crashes, and if you have a little touch due to lack of clearance it'll just keep happening. I'd make a back up of the drive and see what happens after doing a chkdsk.
 
I've had the same error messages in the past and I ran a program called "Spin-Rite" that seemingly fixed it.
That was about 6 months ago and I'm still using the same hard drive and haven't had any problems since running the program. The program goes over the hard drive and marks off bad sectors as unusable so your OS doesn't even see them.
 
Thanks for the help guys. I looked up spin rite and it costs almost as much as a new hard drive. I ran checkdisk and uninstalled a ton of programs. I am going to get a new hard drive ASAP.
 
Picked up a Western Digital 320 GB, 8 MB cache, 7200 rpm IDE drive. Gonna install it tommorrow.:santa:
 
Last edited:
I got a 160 gigabyte western Digital SATA drive. Once I replace my power supply that just died, I will install it. It seems typical that one thing fails and something else decides to do the same.
 
You might want to recheck the old drive, a fading power supply potentially could have caused the drive to have read errors that weren't necessarily really errors.
 
Big Mike said:
You might want to recheck the old drive, a fading power supply potentially could have caused the drive to have read errors that weren't necessarily really errors.
Click to expand...

Alternately, a failing psu can take out other components as it's going bad. But I agree, the "bad" drive should be rechecked just in case.
 
Good idea. I will use my old hard drive to see if my PSU fires up after I change it out. If it is clear of errors, I will install the new drive as a slave drive. :santa:
 
That error may be caused by OC'ing, because of an OC'ed PCI bus or RAM.

That definitely was one of the symptoms to be on the look out for when OC'ing the FSB without a PCI lock. I never gotten that error, but that's why I want motherboards with a PCI lock!

OC'ing the PCI bus to 41 mhz or higher than 37 mhz is asking for that!

Also, may be because your RAM isn't stable. Did you check your RAM with Memtest86 or Prime95 with the blend test?
 
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