Guru or Weird Harold....HELP ......please?

[Kymberley]

My computer told me to do a scandisk yesterday when I tried to reboot.

Then the damn thing told me that I had 18,259 bad sectors.

What in the hell is going on?

Should I be terribly worried? Should I reformat? Should I toss the thing out the window? Buy a new computer?

For answers to these questions, I will even beg?


Please.....please....pretty please with anyone you want on top!!!!!

 

[*bratcat*]

 

[Aquila]

My computer told me to do a scandisk yesterday when I tried to reboot.

Then the damn thing told me that I had 18,259 bad sectors.

What in the hell is going on?

Should I be terribly worried? Should I reformat? Should I toss the thing out the window? Buy a new computer?

For answers to these questions, I will even beg?


Please.....please....pretty please with anyone you want on top!!!!!

Go buy a new harddrive, the one you have is toasty if it has that many bad sectors. no big deal

 

[HeavyStick]

agrees with Aq.... have your hard drive cloned/imaged onto the new one you buy. the sooner the better.

 

[Kymberley]

ah thank you all so much.

One more question, who would I have clone/image my hard drive and will it copy all my files and programs without losing any of them and will it copy any damaged stuff over?

 

[HeavyStick]

there are programs out there, if you don't have anything questionable on there you can have a computer tech transfer all your data. the cost will vary greatly. some quotes are comparable to the price of the software.

personally, I prefer running a new drive from scratch and building it back up, this way i know whats on there and "good" and not "left over junk" from previously installed programs.

 

[Kymberley]

thank you again HeavyStick

I really just want to transfer all my pictures and personal files over.

 

[HeavyStick]

if you have a second hard drive or CD burner, that is very easy to do. just copy and paste it on the second drive as a seperate back up. this way when your primary drive goes bad, you have a static back up

I have 3 hard drives and a CD burner.

My primary drive is for running the computer, my second drive is for pictures and other files. the third drive is the same as the second but I only hook it up to transfer data to, and when the transfer is done I unplug the drive and disconnect it so nothing can corrupt it.

from time to time I'll burn stuff on a CD and put it in safe keeping.

 

[Weird Harold]

My computer told me to do a scandisk yesterday when I tried to reboot.

Then the damn thing told me that I had 18,259 bad sectors.

What in the hell is going on?

A couple of questions before you panic:

How old is your drive and how many times have you run scandisk on it?
-- As a drive ages, it tends to develop bad sectors for a variety of reasons -- in fact, a brand new drive will have some bad sectors, although they're marked in such a way that Scandisk doesn't always report them.

How big is you drive? How big are the sectors?
-- My hard drive is partitioned into 5GB logical drives with 1,257,000 sectors of about 5120 bytes (5Kb) each. Your 188,259 bad sectors is only 1.5% of one of my partitions, or about 0.2% of the full 30GB drive. That's hardly a catastrophic number of bad sectors.

If you run scandisk again, is there an increase in the number of bad sectors?
-- Scandisk's purpose is to find and lock out bad sectors; If it has them locked out, your data is in no immediate danger. OTOH, if scandisk turns up more bad sectors each time you run it, then you need to start thinking about replacing the drive and protecting your data.

I think your best course of action right now is to re-run scandisk a couple of times and determine if the number of bad sectors is constant -- if it is, then set up a weekly run of scandisk to monitor any slow changes and keep bad sectors from corrupting your files.

If the bad sectors are increasing slowly -- one or two at a time -- then you have time to consider your options and back up your files. I've run on a slow failing drive for over year with no loss of data -- I just had to run scandisk about every other day to keep the bad sectors marked.