damaged sector ignored, what does that mean

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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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hi,
one of my harddisks (Seagate barracuda 320 GB) has a damaged sector. This I discovered during the cloning process, I could ignore (part of) this sector and continue cloning. Phew.
This was my backup disk that I use as master now. I hardly used it so far compared to the large amount of hours Seagate more or less guarantees. According to HD tune the 'power on time' was 179 (hours I presume, not days). I don't know how this bad sector occurred considering its short period of use. I should get a refund from Seagate.

Anyway the damaged sector, according to HDtune was somewhere around 4800MB on my C drive, while I have around 3,4GB space used (in defragmented state, so no data is affected by it). What would be the state of this sector on the cloned disk (I'm using now). Since it is skipped in the cloning process and not formatted, can I store data on it or is it possible to format the skipped sector (and not the whole C drive)?

sam 24/04/2010 - 11:40
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truwrikodrorowrelupicugojestutroclulachosaswunuhospikigawakijosaswenomaruclojeueclikaspedrubewidebrisubrohutrurifruuagothunugekedrumucisiuobrobrecrupeslapuswosluprothethibakaslechurathikucli
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Hard disks can develop bad sectors for a number of reasons. Marginal spot in manufacturing that was OK initially but now has slipped to the bad category. Drive being dropped or otherwise subjected to too high a G force causing head damage. The damage can cause microscopic particles to come off the head and float around inside the platter area. The heads, which fly microinches off the platter surface can collide with one of these particles which momentarily causes it to lose its aerodynmic characteristics so it comes down on the disk creating a bad spot. Unfortunately, this can cause more particles to float around and process goes on.

Basic rule is that if you have bad sectors detected then you should pay closer attention to the drive and if more bad sectors are detected then junk the drive.

Right now in a Windows Command window run chkdsk X: /r on every partition on the drive. Replace the X in the command with the drive letter of the partition being tested. The /r will test every sector on the disk not just the in-use ones and will add any bad sectors detected to the bad sector table so they won't be used. You will probably have to look in the Event Log (IIRC, under Applications Winlogin or something like that ) to see the chkdsk report. You will probably have to reboot the PC to get chkdsk to run at least for C:.

sam 24/04/2010 - 15:28