Dave,
From what others are saying here, a new disk might not be a bad idea, but I'll tell you my story as something of a counter example. Well over a year ago my then one and only HD started acting up a bit and I soon got a second one to replace the first as my primary drive. I figured I would keep the old one as a secondary for non-critical stuff until I was convinced it was totally bad or proved OK. At the time I had many bad clusters marked on the disk that had suddenly accumulated. The new disk was built rather unsuccessfully from a diskcopy, which unfortunately picked up all the bad cluster marks from the old drive. Eventually I got it squared away, but with many bad sectors still marked. I figured they probably were not really bad, but by the time I had gone that far I didn't want to fool around, and didn't really know if anything could be done to start clean anyway.
As it turns out, sometime later I was able to wipe my original disk (Maxtor 6.8G) clean and reformat it, and it has been clean ever since. The new drive (WDC 6.4G) was my project for this weekend (that I'm still in the middle of) because of some serious system misbehavior of late. I've wiped it clean and did a new install of Win98 and am just taking a break from restoring all the old stuff- slowly.
The trick to wiping the disk clean is not to just reformat it. A format with no flags still reads the bad cluster marks and preserves them. The first disk I cleaned I used partition magic, though it was an older version than I should have been using. The latest one I did with FDISK and it worked fine. It is set up as a single partition, which I removed and then replaced; then I ran the format. It seems the partitioning removes the bad sector marks, so format starts with a "clean disk". I think you need to do more than just move the partition though. You have to unpartition and then partition again. Of course I ran scandisk (surface scan) before loading any software. No bad clusters were found, which was no surprise since I knew all the bad clusters were from the diskcopy in the first place.
So I guess the moral of the story is that SOMETIMES things happen that can mess up disk clusters that are not permanent damage, and disks can be restored. Than again, as other folks here have said, if the surface has gone bad, it's best to have a new, quality disk.
Dan |
