How to remove bad clusters / sectors from HDD?

**Pyrotechnic** · 01-08-2008

Hi,

My pc was running slow. So I thought of performing scandisk. But after completing scandisk, I found there are some bad clusters on my hard disk. Now I don't know what to do? Anybody knows how to Prevent Bad Cluster and to remove this? I want my pc neat and clean.

**Theodot** · 01-08-2008

Hi,
You can try this :
There are two types of bad sectors
1) soft badsectors
2) mechanical badsectors

1)Soft badsectors can be fixed by running your hard-drive's manufacturer's HD diagnostic utility it will simply replace your badsectors with extra sectors in spare, or it will write 0 on all your HD sectors which will remove bad sectors.

2) if your HD got mechanical badsectors then you cant fix it and all you can do is to take it to company and claim warranty...

**Trojan123** · 01-08-2008

Hi,

Follow the below steps:

1)Open My Computer, and then select the local disk you want to check.
2)On the File menu,Right click>> click Properties.
3)On the Tools tab, under Error-checking, click Check Now.
4)Under Check disk options, select the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors check box.

**justliam** · 15-03-2010

2 years later... I got no chance of getting a reply do i? And this is exactly what my problem consists of minus a few things...
I ran the test that tells you if its mechanical/doomed or fixable. But during the test it stops or appears to stop after numerous hours..Still dont know outcome as Im in phase 2 of the test I started hours ago.
Phase 1 - Whole thing,bout 100 progression blocks took 15min maybe at the most (progression blocks i mean the picture of the 100 or so blocks that fillup as it gets closer to the end).
Phase 2 - 3 Blocks took bout 10min, then it took about 2 hours to get 3 more blocks to make 5. After rougly another 2 hrs hours passed,it was at 5 blocks appearing to be stuck like the other few items that appear to make it stop. But then I moved it a little n shook it up a lil,very softly, to kick start it, an put it down. Its been about 10min n I just looked over and now close to 5hrs its jumped up to 10 blocks. So something got it moving. It seems to stop moving at the same 3 spots so far..(By the way, it never freezes.I can move the mouse if available,even move the window showing the status).

1. Everytime I run ckeckdsk it makes it thru the entire process and finds bad clusters n i believe repairs or does something to them. Basically part 1 of checkdisk. Then part 2 of checkdisk it checks for free space to re-allocate clusters. But at 30% exactly everytime, Always 30% it stops n duz nothing.

2. My image is 2yrs old so i get tons of updates. Just the first round alone offers me about 95 windows updates and about 82 of them are the urgent critical updates. I like to choose custom and choose my updates to download(avoids alot of extra downloading for middle or upgradable updates)
About 66% of the initial windows updates I choose to download all fail n about 33% download fine. But I havent checked the exact numbers so I dont know if its the same updates failing (perhaps in same block) or if its random. I just know its a lot that fail in clumps. However, each time I sould begin the download of the first update I was asked to download SP-3 first everytime. SP-3 is a seperate not bulk list of downloads. So after that failed to dwnload twice,I downloaded just a custom dwnload of only the urgent updates that would pass through the 95 total. BOOM! Windows genuine advantage came up. So maybe thats why i couldnt get SP-3? Bc i didnt install WGA first? Dont you need that to download anything bc it proves you have a valid xp copy? Which I do by the way. I mean yes my clusters are bad, but maybe I couldnt download SP3 bc i didnt have WGA on there yet. But why didnt it ask me for WGA first then? I guess Ill find out if I dont hear back from anyone. Meaning Ill try it again.
Guys sorry so long I just wanted all the details in there. Ill answer all questions breef n to the point going forward. I just didnt want to leave anything out that Im aware of... By the way, Ive re-seeded hard drive and windows boots up fine so software is working. The image is a clean one put on lastnight or this morning (cant remember) and was also used a few hours before on a different machine which had no issues. The only thing i did NOT do is when i dropped the image on this bad cluster laptop I never formatted or re-partitioned from scratch. I was lazy and just chose the option to load the image over, even being warnd it would over-write the existing build or image. Which is what i wanted because it was an old lap running slow with garbage all over it. I know if u take the image off a machine with bad clusters, when u load the image on wherever you decide, you will probably bring the bad clusters with you on the new machine. That doesnt work in reverse, does it?
Ok I guess the questions are..
How can i test if its the clusters and which kind? More importantly how can i repair? Most importantly can i at least cover up n make operations avoid using or going near the bad clusters? Unfortunately when we fix others computers they tend to think judgement of the computer guy = U either know how to fix every possible scenerio including software not even created yet or you dont know how to fix computers. Black and white.
Thank you all! Ifu live in jersey n we can figure this out, lunch on me. Lol.. for real though, why not? And anyone who even tries to help Ill subscribe to your name so i can see your threads n someday soon resolve or help resolve any issue you might have.
Thank you all,
Liam

**Pyrotechnic** · 15-03-2010

Thanks you for providing information to me, your information was very helpful for me and finally i was also to remove bad cluster from my hard drive or else i thought that i had to send to manufacturer for replacement.