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General discussion

Saving a hard drive from inevitable doom

Sep 24, 2004 10:36AM PDT

Booted up my mom's comp and it said that one of the drives had bad sectors and recommended that I run scan disk. After scandisk, it said that physical damage had occurred to the drive and that I should back up the files. My mom has extremely important things on that drive so I transferred them to the secondary hard drive in my comp (no it isn't partitioned it really is a seperate drive). Now I'm just looking for a course of action. Is scandisk just giving me a bogus analysis? Any suggested course of action would be appreciated.

windows 98SE
80gb ultra ata hd that is the trouble

Discussion is locked

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Go to the drive mfr's website and download
Sep 24, 2004 11:39AM PDT

the file to run from a floppy to run diagnostic tests of the drive. That should tell you where you stand.

Is the drive still under warranty?? A few years ago the warranty was 3 years, then most changed to 1 year.

If you you have no receipt to prove when you bought the drive, they will go by the date of manufacture that is on the nameplate. You really do not have to prove ownership.

Good luck.

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Re: Saving a hard drive from inevitable doom
Sep 24, 2004 2:30PM PDT

I would look for the receipt, call the mfg., and get an RMA number, for free replacement (hopefully). The good news: HDD's are cheap to replace, these days (about 69.00 at Fry's for a 120 gig).

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Re: Saving a hard drive from inevitable doom
Sep 25, 2004 2:40AM PDT

I ran scandisk overnight from Windows with a full surface scan. When it was finished it said it didn't find any errors. But now when I boot up the comp, there's no error message or anything. Is it possible scandisk fixed something?

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Re: Saving a hard drive from inevitable doom
Sep 27, 2004 4:45AM PDT

Scandisk scans the HDD sector by sector and it has a better and more rigid testing parameters than checkdisk. If it finds a bad sector, it tries to recover the data written on that defective sector then transfer it elsewhere to a non-defective sector. Scandisk thereafter patches or marks that defective sector as bad so that any data will not be written on it later on.
If bad sectors had been reported in your HDD, then you have to prepare yourself for HDD replacement. Back-up all the files. Don't re-format it (I am referring to the defective HDD) , erase important personal files so you can show the defect to the shop where you bought it, of course, if it is still under warranty, else, you need to buy a new unit.