two bad clusters, is my hard drive gone?

[liteonrules]

i really don't know much about hard drives. i did a surface scan because one of my old computers was running really slow. the surface scan showed two bad clusters.

is it the end of the hard drive's life?
could the bad clusters be fixed?
did the surface scan fixed the problem? thank you

[Dartman]

I think if it's the right type of program it can mark the bad cluster and move recoverable data elsewhere on the drive if anything was there.
If you just did a straight scan it probably just reported them and did nothing. I'm pretty sure the programs in Windows will do it if you run it right and Norton disk docter can do it. If it keeps getting bad spots it could be dying. They're not supposed to get those but it can happen over time.
If you reformat I think it will redo the drive and bad clusters will be repaired or at least marked bad and not used again.

[pranav81]

You can try to repair the drive to remove bad sectors if your drive is a Seagate.There is a software called DiscWizard which is available for download on Seagate's site.I have used it on a friends drive and found that the bad sector's were GONE.No bad sectors on the drive were detected after the zero format.
See ya later,


::Pranav::

[Asrale]

If you have a Western Digital drive, their utility software will mark off the sector so it can't be used again, if it's not repair-able.

[blakerwry]

waht type of surface scan? scandisk?

There are two ways to mark a part of the disk bad, one is at the file system level and the other is at the disk level.

All modern disks (an ything made within the last 3 or so years) have a set aside region of the disk and if a sector goes bad it is automatically remapped to the region set aside.

No information is usually lost and the disk continues to work as normal without your operating system ever knowing what happenned.

Sometimes you might notice that for whatever reason a sector or better yet a cluster has been marked bad at the file system level. This means that the operating system couldn't read from that cluster and after a few unsuccessful attempts marked it as not to be used.

The best way to try and reclaim these parts of disk is to wipe the disk, or in other words fill it with zero's. This is also sometimes called a low level format.

This will erase all data on the disk and will bring it back to its factory fresh setup.

You will then have to partition and format your disk and install an operating system.