What is the difference between Media defects on a hard disk and bad clusters? My hard drive had a problem with bad clusters. When I run scandisk it marks them bad and I can continue. Now I am getting media defects on the drive and scandisk reports it cannot examine drive c: I tried Nuts and Bolts disk fix and it reported I had 15 media defects on the hard drive. What does this mean?

Media defects is a part your hard drive that is physically damaged and these certain areas can't be used or repaired. Data simply can't be written to these parts of the drive. A bad cluster is a part of the hard drive that is marked as unusable, either because it contains media defects, or that it is not correctly formatted. Sometimes this can be repaired by doing a low level format, but that destroys *all* data on the disk. Nuts and Bolts reporting 15 media defects probably means that your hard drive has been damaged, and this cannot be repaired. However, the rest of the hard drive should work without problems, but I would recommend that you run scandisk now and then just to be sure.

My hard drive does not work properly because Nuts and Bolts reported that it could not began to try to patch or try to repair the drive because system files were in use. Whatever that means. Therefore, I get lockups in certain programs and have to reboot.

This means that some files are in use, and cannot be changed in any way (or repaired) when the system is running. Make a boot diskette and copy SCANDISK.exe to it. Boot from the diskette and run Scandisk from there, and it will probably be able to repair your hard drive.