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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shadowman who wrote (70049)	5/4/2010 11:28:04 PM
From: B.K.Myers	Respond to of 110655

"A sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of data. The typical formatting of these media provides space for 512 bytes (for magnetic disks) or 2048 bytes (for optical discs) of user-accessible data per sector." en.wikipedia.org Sectors are established when you format a drive. "A cluster is the unit of disk space allocation for files and directories. To reduce the overhead of managing on-disk data structures, the file system does not allocate individual disk sectors, but contiguous groups of sectors, called clusters." en.wikipedia.org Clusters are created when files or directories are written to the disk drive. A common cause of bad clusters is a program that crashes and doesn't completely close open files. Database programs were common culprits of bad clusters. So, bad clusters don't necessarily indicate that a disk drive is failing. However, bad sectors are a more likely indication that your drive might be starting to fail. Hope this helps. B.K.

To: shadowman who wrote (70049)	5/4/2010 11:35:45 PM
From: Cheeky Kid	Respond to of 110655

I am no expert on the subject of clusters and sectors, PMS Witch would be the person to ask. I had a hard drive with bad sectors slowly die on me about 9 years ago. My next experience with bad sectors was when I had the Y2010 bug with True Image 10.0. It would not let me restore images I created in 2010, gave me this error: E0007001 number of SECTORS differs from counted I searched on the Acronis chat site and found one tech support guy say it's from bad sectors on the hard drive. That got me worried, I thought the drive was failing. So I called Microsoft and asked them if I run chkdsk /r and it fixes bad sectors will it report that the sectors were marked, he said no, you need the manufactures diagnostic software to tell you that. So I got the required software and ran it, the drive was fine, no bad sectors or any problems with the drive. That was a big sigh of relief that it was not my hard drive dying. But a bug with True Image 10.0 cause this happened on 2 machines in the first week of Jan 2010, one week apart. After creating new partitions and formatting after the failed restore, I restored images created on Dec 31 2009, all was fine. I bought True Image 2010. And the rest was history. Sorry for going off topic. That Y2010 bug still bothers me.

To: shadowman who wrote (70049)	5/4/2010 11:40:19 PM
From: Gottfried	Respond to of 110655

shadowman, clusters explained Understand your problem. In a Windows-based file system, a cluster is a block of storage space that is not listed as free, but is not assigned to any file, either. In other words, the file system has marked the cluster to not be overwritten, but it doesn't know why. This does not necessarily indicate any problems with the hard drive itself. Usually, lost or bad clusters are the result of improper program terminations, like those due to power loss or shutting off a computer without closing the applications first. "Do not confuse lost clusters with bad sectors. Bad sectors usually indicate a hard drive that is beginning to fail." ehow.com