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Bad Sectors on HDD, what to do?

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Anonymous

Hi... I hope someone can give some advice on this...

I have a 60 Gb Maxtor HDD, and recently I took my computer ot of my house, but when I got it back to my home I began having some problems... very big problems... I lost over 20 Gb of information due to bad sectors... I supose that i can't recover that info anymore, but what I'm really worried about is my HDD, I downloaded the Powermax utility from maxtor to run a Low Level Format on the disk but... will this do the job?... will the drive work correctly after that?... I meen I don't want to use the drive if some bad sectors will appear again making me lose more files... thanks for the help<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Dario on 04/03/02 01:17 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

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First backup as much of the data as you can. Second you can run that utility, but there is not promise itll actually fix anything. If it cant fix the errors you will need to return the drive to maxtor for a replacement!

Jesus saves, but Mario scores!!!

no.
with a drive one might expect a couple of bad sectors over the lifetime of the drive, but having 20Gb of info trashed is just badbadbad.
in all probability it will happen again soon.

send the drive back.
i believe maxtor has a 3 year warantee

Anything i think of as 'Decent' is unlikely to ever become 'OEM'

Run the Maxtor Diagnostics. The Powermax that they offer has a Low Level Format option. If that runs all the way through then it's not a physical bad sector and they probably won't replace it.

Physical bad sectors are usually taken care of by the micro controller on the drive itself. It allocates space where it can remap the sector if it finds that it can't write it.

<font color=red>People and hard drives are like bandwagon fans and sports!</font color=red>
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Anonymous

Ok... I low level format the drive with the maxtor utility... after that I made a Partition with Fdisk and I give it some format just with format c:, after that everything was ok... I ran the scandisk utility to see if there were any more bad sectors, fortunetly there weren't any... since I tought that maybe it was better to have a NTFS partition rather than the Fat32, I ran the MaxBlast II utility that came with a new drive that I recently bought to do this... I have this drive as a slave the other drive that I bought is the one with Windows XP, when I entered the OS, it told me that something was wrong with the drive... now I tried to delete the partition but now when I make a partition with fdisk and give it format it says that the drive is of 30 Gb or something like that... does someone know if this is for the bad sectors problem or I'm doing something wrong... thanks for the help...



hell!!... I don't have enough money to buy all the new computer stuff

Don't use the <A HREF="http://www.maxtor.com/softwaredownload/default.htm" target="_new">MaxBlast Plus II Disk Overlay software</A> to create partitions, and then install WinXP. The two are not compatible.

Use the WinXP disk to delete the partitions, recreate them, and reformat.

Toejam31

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Anonymous

ok guys thanks for the help... my hard drive is runing again I just hope that those bad sectors don't appear in the future to destroy my information... I don't have any more problems, the problem was that I wasn't creating the partitions correctly, I just wanted to ask you do you think that the drive will be safe from errors?... I have never performed a low level format with this kind of conditions (bad sectors) so I don't know if I should trust in the drive...

hell!!... I don't have enough money to buy all the new computer stuff

I have used low level to recover drives and for the most part they seem ok, however even with a brand new disk there is always a chance for failure. Either backup all important data regularly of get a RAID setup to protect it =)

Jesus saves, but Mario scores!!!

Question: Is the 60GB Hard Drive and ATA/100 drive? I'm assuming it is. the real question is whether or not you IDE controller supports ATA/100. If not then that is probably what caused the problems in the first place. I went through 2 harddrives before i fianlly realized my mobo didnt suport the ATA/100 drives i was using on it.

The drives are usually backward compatible. I have a ata100 hd using a 40pin ide cable running with ata33 controller. No problem just running slower using ata33.

:eek:  :frown: :mad:  :eek:  :redface: :cool: :lol:  :tongue: :wink: - What do you want to feel today? :) 

I run ATA100 drives on old ATA33 motherboards all the time, it is not a problem. You may have had a problem, but this was not likely the source, unless it's a defect in your particular chipset/board/BIOS.

What's the frequency, Kenneth?
Anonymous

This is for Toejam31, it does work fine with maxblast's partition and win xp. I'm assembler of pc and i always use this disk to partition (fast) and win xp can be installed as if i used fdisk.

I have a tri processor XP 1900+, i can say that my 'notepad' is very fast now...

I'm glad it worked for you, and I appreciate the message. But ... this is what the manufacturer says on the website about the product, and that's what I prefer to go by until further notice:

Quote:
<b>Special Notice to Windows XP and Windows 2000 Users:</b> MaxBlast Plus v1.27s and MaxBlast Plus II (v1.00) do not currently support Windows XP or Windows 2000 and should not be used to setup, partition, and format a hard drive if Windows XP or 2000 are to be installed. If your system's BIOS cannot support the drive's full capacity, it is recommended that you obtain a BIOS upgrade from your system or motherboard manufacturer. If a BIOS upgrade for your system is not available, then you may want to consider purchasing a PCI ATA controller such as Maxtor's Ultra ATA card available at <A HREF="http://www.maxtordirect.com/" target="_new">Maxtor Direct</A>.

If your system BIOS is capable of supporting the drive's full capacity, it is recommended that you perform a standard installation of Windows 2000 / XP without the MaxBlast software to partition and format the hard drive. A new version of MaxBlast will be released in April 2002 that will fully support Windows XP and will be made available on our web site.


Toejam31

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