if i successfully did a thorough scandisk and defrag...and i have bad sectors...do i have to worry bout future loaded files being written into that sector? also...if i was to format my harddrive...will i have to scandisk the harddrive again for the bad sectors?

 

No and no. When scandisk finds bad sectors on a drive, each sector will get labeled and set aside as bad for good, and no data gets written to them in the future. Even if you reformat, format.com will not use the bad sectors in the FAT table. After the format is done you will see a total of bytes in good and bad sectors (so you'll know if you have a completely healthy disk, it reads 0 bytes in bad sectors). Even if you delete the partition(s), those marked sectors should still be there when you format the new ones.

 

so i don't have to worry bout the harddrive goin haywire again huh???man i don't knoe what happened but...i fdisk...format...and scandisk...the scandisk took a total of two or more days to totally complete...it keeps on freezing up...at times it just sits there and grinds...but last nite was when i tried scandisk again and it was able to successfully finished...

 

No, you definitely do have to worry about the hard disk going haywire again. By the way, is it an IBM GXP drive? Some of those have been having a lot of trouble recently, and IBM released a special test program (Drive Fitness Test).

Keep an eye on that hard drive. If it were me, I'd be looking for a replacement already.

 

did i mention it was a laptop...i tried to take it apart but couldn't figure out how...grr...

 

One thing to also note... most hard drives are covered under warranty by the manufacturer for 3 years. If their utility can prove that the drive has bad sectors, they will replace it free of charge (some charge shipping to you), and you pay shipping back to them. But don't contact Compaq, IBM, etc. You need to pull out the drive, and contact the support department of the DRIVE manufacturer, not the PC manufacturer (unless it's a Dell, in which case, contact Dell first). Just another way to get a new drive with no bad sectors.

 

hey i dont know much about computers other than like normal stuff that most every younger person who has has a few classes knows but my computer is like a year and a half old its a dell and it gets illegal opperation messages all the time and freezes up and stuff, how do i run a scan for bad sectors or is that what is run when the computer is shut down wrong and you start it back up. What i want to do is format the hard drive, ive saved all my files on to cdr's but i really dont know who to format the hard drive and then reinstall all of the original pc software, i have the restore disks.. can someone give me some instructions

 

Since your PC is a Dell, and you have the restore disks, you get free tech support from Dell. Give them a call (the tech support number is on their http://www.dell.com/ and click on "contact us") and they will walk you through the format/reinstall. I could tell you how, but each Dell restore disk set is so different that I'd be shooting blind trying to walk you through it. Give them a call, and tell them that you want to "reformat and restore the original software from the Dell restore CD" and they'll take care of you.

 

thanks ill have to do that this weekend.