Bad Sectors

I've read through the various threads regarding bad sectors and they've been very helpful, I didn't realise that drives are shipped with bad sectors.

Anyway my problems is this. I have taken in a PC that has bad sectors which Scandisk has marked as BB0BBB000000 B=Bad 0=OK I'm a little concerned that they appear in the first sectors like this. The owner was complaining of running problems which I'd thought had been eliminated with AV and Spyware scanning. It is certainly much better than when I first got a hold of it, no crashes and W98 runs smoothly but the bad sectors do concern me. I've tried Ghosting the bad drive to a new one but am still getting bad sectors reported.

I expect files in the B to be bad on the new drive but not the drive sector itself. Is my assumption correct or is this a coincidence?

 

Hi gengis

if you are using W95 or W98 there's a thing you can do to the registry to make scandisk retest the bad clusters in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article

best wishes, HJ

 

That's really strange. I understand that Ghost takes the files and even corrects any fragmentation when it makes .gho files, so it shouldn't carry bad sector information to a clean drive, according to the .pdf file at least. Even when cloning a drive I've never seen bad sectors repored, but I generally don't bother to look for bad sectors because the OS seems to take care of them satisfactorily. The ones I worry about are the ones that aren't reported.

Normally there's no reason to be concerned by bad sectors because they aren't used by the file system. But if they're incresing in number, that's different. Apparently they aren't interfering with the boot sectors or FATs/MFTs or directories, etc.

Maybe I'm missing your point?