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[mindaz]

today I found some bad sectors on HDD  :-/
is it possible to fix these sectors?
which soft is the best ?
 

[Jimbob]

once you get a few, the rest tend to follow.

buy a new hdd and copy everything over, before it is too late.
they are so cheap, dont take the risk.

[Kevin Wood]

Most hard drives remap sectors internally as they start to fail, which means that, by the time it gets to the point that the operating system (and hence you, the user) is aware, it has run out of free space to remap internally.

I agree with Jimbob. Get another drive ASAP and copy everything over before it dies completely.

Kevin

[Nickbat]

I'm probably wrong, but I thought you can't just copy files onto a new HDD if it is a system disc. You need to use a ghost program, I think. :-/

However, I've never used a ghost program and I would  like to know exactly how to do it, as I fancy upgrading my own system HDD.

[djac]

I'm not sure of the current situation, but it used to be that, if one of the drives involved was a Maxtor or Seagate, you could use the free utility MaxBlast to copy/clone/format etc.....

[mindaz]

I'm probably wrong, but I thought you can't just copy files onto a new HDD if it is a system disc. You need to use a ghost program, I think. :-/

However, I've never used a ghost program and I would  like to know exactly how to do it, as I fancy upgrading my own system HDD.

what ghost program , please explain 

[mindaz]

I'm not sure of the current situation, but it used to be that, if one of the drives involved was a Maxtor or Seagate, you could use the free utility MaxBlast to copy/clone/format etc.....

my HDD is Western Digital 320GB 

[Kevin Wood]

I'm probably wrong, but I thought you can't just copy files onto a new HDD if it is a system disc. You need to use a ghost program, I think. :-/

However, I've never used a ghost program and I would  like to know exactly how to do it, as I fancy upgrading my own system HDD.

Yes, if you wanted to simply copy the whole system over then you need to clone / ghost the entire drive.

I probably wouldn't do that in this case, because the drive has already started to fail, so you risk copying corrupted data to the new drive.

A better (though more time consuming) plan would be to re-install the OS and applications onto a new drive and then copy over any documents, etc.

Kevin

[wingman]

Western Digital used to supply a floppy disk of software with their new HDD's that enabled you to copy data disk to disk. Not sure if they still do that, but as Kevin says maybe better to reinstall everything on the new disk to avoid any probs, but this is a right PITA.  Ghost is a software by Symantec that allows you to take an exact image of your original disk and then store this on another. You can then use this stored image to restore your PC to its original state.

[Nickbat]

I'm probably wrong, but I thought you can't just copy files onto a new HDD if it is a system disc. You need to use a ghost program, I think. :-/

However, I've never used a ghost program and I would  like to know exactly how to do it, as I fancy upgrading my own system HDD.

what ghost program , please explain 

As Wingman describes. 

[mindaz]

ok , everything is clear now 

[TheBoy]

Absolutely agree with Kevin Wood's first post - the drive will hide all bad sectors (every drive has some), until such a point that it has no spare space to remap them to.

If ever you see a bad sector on a drive made within the last 15yrs, its knackered. Get your data off ASAP, and replace.


Many retail drives come with utils for cloning the drive, or there are retail versions of software such as Symantec Ghost, Acronis, Altiris etc etc.

[mindaz]

is it possible to move these bad sectors to one place 
this picture is only for example 
thanks

[Kevin Wood]

is it possible to move these bad sectors to one place 
this picture is only for example 
thanks

I know where I'd move them to..

Beneath a club hammer, followed by the bin, after copying any remaining data off.

Kevin

[aaronjb]

is it possible to move these bad sectors to one place 
this picture is only for example 
thanks

The drive automatically does that as someone mentioned earlier; every drive has X percent sectors 'reserved' at manufacturing time and when a regular sector cannot be read or written to it is marked 'offline' and (if possible) the data is written to a reserved sector instead, bringing the reserved sector into regular use.

Once the drive runs out of reserved sectors you start seeing what you're seeing - which means the drive has already exhausted it's reserved sectors and is suffering creeping death..

Only one thing to do now. Bin it, as Kevin says, and exact retribution if you feel so inclined.

Thermite is good.