Hard Disk bad sectors

[GMS]

My sons PC refused to boot Win 98 a few days ago - I removed his drive & set it up in another test PC as slave to see what was up. Scan disk reports bad sectors
and defrag marks them as bad. Curiously it reports the files ocuppying these sectors as User, & Sysytem Dat files only - the registry files. Restoring these from backups allows the drive to boot OK and for the time being itsrunning OK

I realise I will eventually have to replace the drive but, I am curiose to find out why only the sectors these two files ocupy have failed.

My questions are:
When defragging most data is shuffled - some is not moveable . Does the registry write to the same place on the disk overe and over and this results in eventual disk damage?

Whilst it could be a coincidence that only these two DAT files were affected what other reason could there be for the problem?

Thanks to all who reply

Garry Stafford UK

[Smoke24]

Whatever brand drive it is you may be able to go to their website and download a utility program from the support section that will test and may even be able to repair the drive. At least it should tell you for sure if the drive is going bad. Sounds more like something has corrupted the registry than a bad drive. You may have picked up a virus of some sort, so I would also make sure your anti-virus software is up to date and run it too.

[GMS]

Thanks for replying Smoke

If Win 98 defrag marks the sectors as bad then thats its analysis of the drive...

The drive is a WD Caviar 21600

I'm just curiouse about the fact the reg files were the only data affected.
Does the OS save the reg files in the same place on the disk every time or is it randon?
If it does then the read / write process returns to the same place every bootup and shut down - if this is correct it would add wear to that part of the drive?

If this is a nonsense assumption then would someone tell me so.

My question I geuess is achedemic rather than of crucial importance.

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

GMS UK

[Smoke24]

I don't know but wouldn't think that it writes the reg files to the same place on the drive every time but once written they may be immovable. Still try the WD utility. You can get it at www.wdc.com/service/ in the form of a download or an online test. You may have one of the problematic WD drives which they have been good about replacing under warranty.

[HAL9000]

Western Digital 21600's have to be one of their absolute worst drives. They have a complete write up on their site about that model. Get a new drive and keep that one for a paperweight.

[Hpro]

Hi,
first of all it is not DEFRAG which markes the sectors BAD,but it's SCANDISK .
As HAL worte WD drive have become very LOW LEVEL PRODUCT there where times when this Brand was the supeirior Hard drive..

Now a word to Regedit's System and User.dat - both of this files arent files which can't be moved those files are free to move.. This was coincidence that it hit those two files - and you got the evidence on your computer becasue you restored System and User Data from backup and now it runs - OK the sectors where marked BAD to prevent any ohter programs to write to this part of the Disk..

Download the WDDIAG.EXE place it on a bootable floppy and then test your Drive - if there aren't more than 10 BAD Cluster found then the program will move the bad Sectors to the end of the drive - this seen in the numbered way - but you will not see any bad sectors when the program has finished .. if the prog finds more than 10 bad Cluster (this equals about 8 MB of space)then it will tell you to contact WD..

The reason why those two files where found bad is because this two files are used from almost every program when it starts - so this - I saw this quite often that those two files are going bad...or the place where those two files are on the disk..

Hope this helps..

[brparrish]

Check out Spinrite 5.o at Steve Gibson 's sight grc.com. It is unbelieveable. Fixes bad sectors revives weak sectors etc, but plan on it taking 14 hrs for instance on a 15 gig drive .It just saved my you know what!!!

[GMS]

Thanks to all who replied.

Will try the advice you all offered and will no doudt find a use the for the disk for something more imaginative than a paper weight.
I think I might try for a world record in 'hard disk skidding' on a local lake. similar to stone skipping. Anti polution tests permiting.:-)


GMS UK

[Smoke24]

I think before I tossed it in the local lake I would give WD their one big chance to replace it. Who knows their newer ones may actually be decent stuff.

[HAL9000]

Nope, just sent back a model 21600 with a few days of warranty left on it about 6 months ago. It ran in a machine for about 3 months before failing again.