HDD Problems

[t0rek]

I'm suspecting that my HDD has a few bad sectors. Windows's scandisk/chkdsk tool is to slow and crappy to use. Does anyone know about a good program to check the HDD surface for bad sectors and disable them? Any help would be really aprecciated...

UPDATE: Tried the Windows Scandisk tool and it advance a little and then the PC freezes, so I need a really strong program...

[smcd]

I'd vouch for older versions of Norton Disk Doctor (version 3 for Win9x) but newer ones seem to be piss poor (same goes for all their tools norton/symantec).

[GCFreak]

You can disable them but Windows XP can't stand Bad-Sectors, therefore you will have to get a New HDD.

[t0rek]

I downloaded a tool called Seatools from Seagate site, it just diagnostic HDDs but it doesn't fix the problems. Actionally I only have a bad sector on the whole HDD, but I need a tool to find it and fix. Or a tool that let me mark that sector as bad because Seatools showed me the sector number. What do you recommend?

@sethmcdoogle: yeah, I'm agree, old NDD was great, but nowadays is very crappy, and I don't know if the old NDD is compatible with Windows XP

[GCFreak]

Did you even read my post? You need to get a new HDD, or else you will have serious problems with Windows XP. There is absolutely no way to get rid of bad sectors.

[t0rek]

Did you even read my post? You need to get a new HDD, or else you will have serious problems with Windows XP. There is absolutely no way to get rid of bad sectors.

Yeah I did, you newbie...

After all Seatools was able to fix bad sectors (well mark them as bad).
This tool seems to work with all HDDs. If you guys ever come with a problem like mine, I recommend it...

[GCFreak]

I'm not a newbie, I have almost 400 posts.

[t0rek]

I'm not a newbie, I have almost 400 posts.

985 here... So? a higher number of posts doesn't mean you are a better member, or you are not a newbie, a member could have 5000 posts and still be a newbie and a spammer. BTW, you arrived here some months ago, and arrived here years ago.

So why I'm telling you are a newbie? I didn't pay atention to your post, because is totally ilogical. Windows XP can stand HDD bad sectors. In fact if you use your PC and the data never "gets" into the bad sector yor PC would run normally and without troubles. The problem comes when data "goes" to the bad sector, if that's the case you'l get data corruption of the file, or Windows may not boot.

But just one bad sector on the whole HDD is not the end of the world. I've been using PCs since DOS 5.1 was around. I'm pretty sure there's people here with more experience than me, that would tell you that one bad sector in a HDD is not bad. A lot of them is a serious problem, and means your HDD is considerably damaged and needs to be changed. If I get a lot of bad sectors I OBVIOUSLY will change my HDD

In fact a bad sector never gets fixed, the program just mark it as bad, and in the future the system won't use it to storage data. So it would not cause trouble because it won't ever be used again. So just a sector of a whole HDD means nothing...

[zAlbee]

Way to tell it t0rek .

Try Scandisk again. It will fix errors when it can. It is supposed to take a long time, but it's not normal for it to crash in the middle... Are you using the mode where Scandisk loads at the beginning of a boot?

[t0rek]

Thanks for the help zAlbee, but I already fixed the problem using Seatools from Seagate. I used the one that boots from a CD into DOS, and fixed the problem without freezing. After the problem was fixed, I runned Chkdsk (scandisk and chkdsk are the saem thing, MS just changed the name with WinXP) and runned out the test without problems. I must give credit to Psyman for the advices and help he gaven on IRC. This Seatools proggie works with any other HDD as well, not only with Seagate's ones. I really recommend it. Here's the link, for the record...

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/