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YE · May 9, 2003, 07:07 PM

:) Hi,. How you doing?
I have a C: Drive with bad clusters on it and I was wondering,. is there any way possible for me to fix it?
I just wanted to know before I just throw it out.

Thanks
~YEONEZ~

DylanFogle · May 9, 2003, 10:31 PM

Ok. So you have bad clusters on your hard drive. This may or may not be fixable. It really depends on how bad and how many of the clusters are bad. But a low level format could help, or it may just prolong the agony.
What you need to do is run a partition removal debug script on the hard drive. This will ERASE EVERYTHING on the hard drive, so backup your data first or its gone. You will need a windows 98 or ME boot disk on floppy for this to tool to work. Debug Script. This is just a basic run through of debug. After you do the debug then you need to reboot and run fdisk and reboot and format the hard drive. If these steps don't work then you will probably need to buy a new drive. Let me know if this helps and if you need anymore explanation. Also let me know if you don't agree, Im open for discussion.

YE · May 12, 2003, 05:08 PM

Hey,. thanks for the info. I will try it and see what happens. I'll get back to you and let you know what's up.

Thanks again!

DylanFogle · May 12, 2003, 09:37 PM

Just another thought if the debug doesn't work. Here is a good page with info on the Zero Fill, which might work, basically it writes nothing but 0's to every address on a hard drive, it takes a while but might work better.
Also here is a page with links to most of the hard drive manufacturers diagnostic programs try those. http://www.bootdisk.com/utility.htm

YE · May 15, 2003, 07:46 PM

Hey,. thanks again for you help but I guess I got to buy a new C:drive. I tried everything, nothing worked :-[
Guess it's time to go and see what's up with some deals on e-bay ;)

8) ~Thanks~

ScottGem · May 19, 2003, 05:34 AM

Whoa! You need to understand what bad clusters are. Your hard drive (like all magnetic storage media) consists of platters that are coated with magnetic material. This material has a polarity of either positive or negative. Your computer reads the polarity of each section of the platter as the 0s and 1s of the binary numbering system. This is then translated into intelligible data on your system.

Sometimes, the magnetic coating in an area of the platter will weaken or be damaged to the point where it cannot hold the polarity. The SCANDISK utility detects such areas and moves the data off the area and marks it as bad so it will not be used again.

Bad sectors are NOT uncommon but they cannot be fixed, just marked sio they won't be used. A disk with bad sectors is still very usable and does NOT need to be replaced.

What you do with such a disk is run SCANDISK with a surface scan. Then do this daily for a week or so. If no more bad sectors pop up then your drive is stable and does not need to be replaced. However, if more continue to show, only then would I consider replacement.