Ask Me Help Desk - Hard Disk

Quote:

Originally Posted by preeti sharma

Hi All

I was getting physical problem in my hard disk C: drive, on scanning I got 11 bad clusters , also it was mentioned that from now onwards these bad clusters will not be used for data storage .
Now I want to upgrade to WIN XP from 98 , so plz tell me what should I do for that, and should I delete all partitions and recreate them again or not.

thanks

Different issues here. First some background. A hard drive is composed of plastic platters that are coated with magnetic particles. The platter is then divided into areas that hold either a positive or negative magnetic polarity. These corresponded to the 0s and 1s of the binary numbering system. What causes a sector to go bad is when that sector loses too much of the magnetic charge so it can no longer hold the polarity. A Disk Repair utility like SCANDISK will find such sectors, move the data from them (if possible) and mark them as bad so they won't be used.

Bad sectors are not uncommon and its not a problem for a drive to have up to 5% bad sectors. However, once a drive gets bad sectors it needs to be monitored for awhile to see if more sectors go bad. If they don't then the drive is stable.

When a drive is formatted and sectors too weak to hold a charge will be marked and not allowed to store data.

I would be inclined to do a clean install of XP rather then an upgrade. You will need to make sure you have drivers for all your hardware (do a compatibility check first), back up your data and make sure you have install files or disks for all your software.

As for partitioning, I recommend at least 3 partitions. A OS partition, a data partion and a programs partition.