Hi... I was just wondering... I once had maybe 5 or 6 bad sectors once when I improperly shut down my computer (It was a 80386 DX or 486, whatever, with a 175.5MB Hard Drive). By that time, I had Windows 95 on it. I then thought it couldn't take Windows 95 and formatted it (The very first Windows 95 by the way, not a or b). It did all of the processes (Recovering Allocation Units and, plain formatting). After that, I installed MS-DOS 6.22 Operating System. Then I reinstalled Windows for Workgroups 3.11. After that, I Reinstalled all the Windows 16-bit files Blah Blah Blah. And when I decided to run Microsoft Defrag, It kept on saying I had errors on it... I then ran Scandisk and found EVEN more Bad sectors. I then did all the Fdisk stuff also included on the other messages, but it was still the same. I then used a "Ontrack Data Manager file" and formatted there. After it was done, I ran scandisk again, just incase. What happened then was that there were like maybe 22 Bad sectors. I formatted, repartioned, and scandisked, but the bad sectors were still there. No more, No less. Can anyone help me? Please reply on the forum and on my email. Thx! DarkMako P.S. I gave it to a professional technision and he got it working like a charm, no bad sectors, until I shut it down improperly.. then a whole bunch came up!

Sorry, I was asking "What is going on?" also... Thx DarkMako

Well, there probably isn't much you can do to get rid of these bad sectors. Judging from all the things you tried, I would say these bad sectors are caused by some sort of surface defects (dust paricle, scratch, fading magnetic field of original lowlevel format,etc...) on the hard disk's platters. However, having said that, when you run scandisk, it marks these bad sectors as unusable in the file allocation table, and "fixes" them, at least until you format the disk again. It doesn't truely fix them, it just hides them from the OS basically, so it won't try to use them. When you started out with just 4 or 5, I guessing scandisk hadn't been run in a while, but I'm sure these bad sectors were there, lying in wait to ruin your day, like lions stalking you in the tall grass ;) . Scandisk will not always detect bad sectors, it may take mutiple tries to pick them all up. This is because some bad sectors are maginally bad, meaning that the can be read from and written to sometimes (probably the fading magnetic field). In any case, keep running scandisk ever so often, just to check to see if the amount increases over time. If this is the case, then the hard disk is probably on the way out. The tech that "fixed" your bad sectors probably just reformated the drive, and didn't verfiy the format or run scandisk on it afterwards. That wiped the original file allocation table (FAT), and all it took for you to get them again was a good old windows crash. After windows was improperly shutdown, scandisk ran automatically, and walla, it found the bad sectors that the tech had supposedly cured. Sorry for such a long post, just started rambling.......

I too have found that Scandisk finds bad sectors that are not really there. However, if it keeps finding them after they have been formatted off, you almost surely have bad places on your hard drive surface. FORMAT.COM from MS-DOS 4.00 will erase Scandisk flags where later versons of format will not.

try "low level format"