What causes bad sectors?

[cracked]

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bad sectors piss me off, my HDD starts acting iffy about every week or so, then i run scandisk to fix bad sectors and it is fine for a while then it starts crapping out on me again. what exactly is causing this to happen? are there little microscopic elves in there with hammers beating up my sectors or what? Thanks!

Cr/-\c|<e|)

Try reading this: http://webopedia.lycos.com/TERM/B/bad_sector.html
or this: http://www.computeruser.com/resource...tml?lookup=389

[daveleau]

Most often, the OS is what causes bad sectors. If you have bad sectors you can low level format the disk and then reinstall the OS. Usually low level formatting will get rid of software based bad sectors. I have had hdds where the drive had to be llf'ed twice to get rid of the bad sectors. I am still using that drive with no problems and no bad sectors.

If the bad sectors are not corrected, then it is a problem with the hardware and not a software-created problem. These are much more rare, but possible.

Dave

[NDC]

Another cause of bad sectors are the heads making contact with the HDD platter which may be caused from severe physical shock or vibrations... In this case, low-level format will not help...

[nunyadam]

Or you could just have an IBM like me.

[daveleau]

Yes, I ahev heard of alot of hardware failures with them. The last drive I had that did that was a 20GB 7200rpm Maxtor. I had 3 of those go out. NOT TOO GOOD! lol Those were all hardware failures that gave the click-click-click of death.

[NDC]

Yep, I also hear their Cuctomer Service is really crappy to top it off. Western Digital or Maxtor is the way to go for IDE interface HDD's!

[cracked]

the drive i am talking about is a WD.

daveleau, i have also had 3 20gb 7200rpm maxtors die on me. it sucked as they were in my moms computer and she thought i was the one who "broke" it lol.

Cr/-\c|<e|)

[laogoagen]

i just read that longer usb cords may not send enough power th devices, could trying to write data to a device that isn't getting enough power cause bad sectors?

[paul9]

That would more likely just cause corrupted data, than a bad sector. A bad sector is an area on the drive where it is no longer physically possible to store data correctly. It usually takes physical damage or a manufacturing defect to cause this. Low power operation would either not allow the drive to power up, or make writes unreliable. Corrupted writes should be caught by the drive's own error checking, but if the power is marginal, that could possibly be interfered with, too.

Nice ten year dead thread revival, btw.