scandisk bad cluster

a colleague of mine has a error on his win 98 machine where each time he boots and reboots his machine scandisk runs once and then a second time in the old dos style reporting a bad cluster on hard drive. after exiting this second scandisk win 98 may or may not load, when it does'nt load properly he has a frozen desktop with no input from mouse or keyboard.

is it a matter of reformatting and reinstaling, and will this cure a bad cluster?

thanks for any help offered... a million times thrice.

 

Boot to DOS and run a thorough scandisk from there.

Scandisk /Surface

 

And back up everything immediately. This is often the beginning of the end.

 

thanks for the confirmation

 

As Abraxas says it could be the beginning of the end, but it may only require the bad cluster to be marked as such, by Scandisk(Thorough Scan as recommended by Whiphil will do that). There are many disks running quite happily with bad sectors on them. Just keep an eye on them and if you keep getting more, yes, the disk is heading south.
Once that is done it may require a reinstall of any software which had data stored there...That may explain the freezes.

 

excellent info supplied as usual, have acted on abraxas info and once again... thank you all.

 

And "just" backed up the data???

If you haven't run a Scandisk to find and mark the sector(s) as bad, you will/could continue to be placing data onto a bad area of the disk, which will continue to be corrupted.

Get rid of the bad sector with Scandisk, and the run it again periodically. If it continues to find more bad sectors, the drive is heading south.