Install Around Bad Sector?

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JustinSane

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My friends hard drive is dieing. He has to reformat like every month because eventually his windows folder gets corrupted. This might be the stupidest question ever asked but is there a way to format around a bad sector on a hard drive? It's gonna be a while before he can get a new drive.
 
Run a chkdsk with the option to scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. I believe this also marks sectors as bad so data won't get written to it. But if the drive is failing its not going to stop additional sectors from going bad.

Warning, chkdsk can possibly delete files when trying to fix things.

google chkdsk.
 
JustinSane said:
My friends hard drive is dieing. He has to reformat like every month because eventually his windows folder gets corrupted.
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The reason you are having to do it over and over is that more sectors are dieing. If you are doing a full format, and not a quick format with each reinstall, you are already installing around bad sectors as a full format checks each sector as the drive formats.

The more sectors that die, the faster additional sectors will die as there is typically trash on the disk surface that keeps getting pulled into new areas by the disk head.
 
The problem is that, in most cases, if the HDD is dying, it will continue to go bad. Modern drives already have the logic in place to map around bad sectors - if you're running out of spare sectors, the drive is on its way out & will keep going bad. Time to nut up & get a new drive.
 
It's also possible the hdd controller is taking a crap, and causing the data to get corrupted. While the latter may be a rare occurence, it is possible.
 
If it were me I'd just tell my friend to scrape together 35 to 40 bucks to buy a cheap drive and do away with having to re-install Windows every month.
 
JustinSane said:
My friends hard drive is dieing. He has to reformat like every month because eventually his windows folder gets corrupted. This might be the stupidest question ever asked but is there a way to format around a bad sector on a hard drive? It's gonna be a while before he can get a new drive.
Click to expand...

This is a horrifying level of tolerance for things not working. How can he possibly put up with this? It's like watching an episode of Hoarders.

Continuing with this hard drive is not an option because it will be (and almost certainly already has been) corrupting data other than the system files.

What is he using the computer for?
 
If you do a proper diagnosis of the drive (with the manufacturer's diagnostic or MHDD) and you find that the particular bad sectors are all in a very small/specific area of the drive, aka close together and not spread all over the platters/layout, it's possible to simply repartition the drive so a) those sectors obviously aren't written to anymore and b) remapping them won't become a necessity at all and you're able to "save" the spare sectors every drive has for such purposes.

Repartitioning around the area or simply creating a blank partition with nothing on it (empty space seen as unallocated) is a workable solution to extend the life of such hardware, but it's not the best solution - that's a replacement drive with no damage at all.

If the drive fails the manufacturer's diagnostic or has severe levels of sector damage per a full MHDD scan, it needs to be replaced, period. If it passes the manufacturer's diagnostic and shows light sector damage, it can still be used for some time depending on how much data is on it.

Obviously the best course of action is a new drive, but there's no guarantee that a brand new drive won't crap out quick either - and I've had brand new drives go out completely (bearings froze up) in under 7 days of use with barely any actual data being put on them in that week of usage.

"New" doesn't mean perfect - new stuff can die just as fast as anything else. Hell, I know a guy that is still using an original IBM "Deathstar" 60GXP he bought in 2001 - seriously. It's still got his original installation of XP on it as well, done in late 2002, and he still uses it as his primary hard drive and his primary OS every single day.

Old doesn't mean bad either. :D
 
Buy a new drive and be done with it. You can Newegg a decent size for 40-50 bucks. Even if the new one goes bad, you would at least have some type of warranty.
 
The WD diagnostic tool is very good if it's a WD drive. My cousins system recently was having some problems. Windows setup could not even run this drive was so screwed up. WD boot CD found errors, repaired them, and now everything works.
 
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