About Bad sectors

[Kymberley]

Does reformatting a hard drive elimate bad sectors on the drive?




Bonus Question:

I have another drive that was taken down by some type of virus. It won't let me reformat the drive or reinstall windows on it. Any way to fix that?


A for extra credit!


One other drive I have has given me the error message....

operating system not found (or maybe it was no operating system found)

Same thing with this one...how can I reinstall windows on it?


Thanks for your answers.

I will check back if I can get the computer rebooted again.

Thanks!

 

[d_arthur]

Does reformatting a hard drive elimate bad sectors on the drive?

Nope. Use norton disk doctor or a special formatting utility to mark off bad sectors, to ensure they do not get written to. (Once a sector goes bad its bad, end of story.)

Bonus Question:

I have another drive that was taken down by some type of virus. It won't let me reformat the drive or reinstall windows on it. Any way to fix that?

Take a big magnet to it. Seriously.
Alternately, connect it to you computer as your master drive on your primary IDE bus and boot from a Windows install CD. You'll have to set up your partitions and format but I think a starndard Windows install CD can do that. If you can't do that with a Windows install CD then boot with a DOS floppy (make sure its read only as not to infect the floppy) and run FDISK. Delete your main partition, then create a new partition (max size possible) and set it to you sctive partition. Exit FDISK and FORMAT C: Once your format is done you should be ready to reinstall your OS.

A for extra credit!


One other drive I have has given me the error message....

operating system not found (or maybe it was no operating system found)

Same thing with this one...how can I reinstall windows on it?

Boot with your Windows install CD. With WinXP, it should be pretty straightforward and the installer should walk you through it. (Not so sure about earlier versions of windows.)


I hope some of that helped.

 

[Kymberley]

Helped greatly

Thank you

 

[The Heretic]

Viral agents don't cause bad sectors - bad sectors are caused by... well bad sectors. Bad sectors are a hardware error on the disk. Viral agents cannot cause hardware errors, only logical or soft errors. Reformatting will not remove a bad sector, but if properly done it will detect a bad sector and mark it as such. If a sector or group of sectors has been scrambled by a viral agent reformatting the disk will unscramble those sectors.

If you can't reformat the disk, then you are either doing something wrong, or you are still infected with a viral agent, or there is something wrong with the hardware of either the disk or hard drive controller - but I reiterate, viral agents cannot cause hardware problems (they can infect firmware though).