i have two hard drives in my system. the one im concerned about is not the boot hard drive. the hard drive im concerned about is a quantum fireball kx 20 gig hard drive. out of nowhere this hard drive started togenerate bad sectors. i tried using scan disk on thorough but scan disk would freeze when it go to the bad sector and the hard drive would make a weird noise when it was scanning that sector. i tried the zero filling utility from quantum and it deleted everything and i created a new partition and formatted and i scan disked and everything was fine then. but later on about two days ago after using about 14gigs of the hd it started to generate bad sectors. again i ran the zero filling utility and created partition and formatted and i ran scan disk and not it freezs when it gets to the bad sector. how do i fix this? i do not want to buy a new hd since i dont have the money for it now, and i need this hard drive for extra storage, is ther anything i can do?

well..I hate to tell you this but it sounds like your hd is failing on you... just search around on the net and see of you can find a program that could make thoes sectors off limits...

The fact that your bad sectors are breeding is a sign that something is seriously wrong and you should therefore move any required info to another hdd soonest. Forget the poverty plea, a hdd is much cheaper than having to recover important data. It suggests the hdd is on the way out. If it is connected as a slave on the primary ide channel, I would try it as a master or slave on the secondary ide channel. Scandisk does not fix bad blocks, it only attempts to identify and mark them and identify and restore any data/files that have become 'lost'. The only way I know to get rid of bad blocks is to to reformat the disk concerned. I use the dos FORMAT command with the /U and /C options. If the bad block can be used it resets them as so. But if there are lots, something caused this in the first place. Good luck - keep us posted.

I had a HD do this to me a while ago. scandisk would seemingly freze, but if left alone(for days) it would eventually get through. when it finally did finish, it would give an error and power down the computer. I was told that a bad sector is an indication of a phisical imperfection on the disk, and that once bad sectors begin showing up, the disk continues to head south until it ultimetly fails. first of all, back up NOW. my disk that failed was my primary and only disk, but it had a 1Gig Linux partition on it that seemed un effected. because some windows system files resided on the bad sectors, windows would fail to load. i had to boot up my linux partition and then backup the files to CDs. if this was not an option, i would have tryed to find a friend with a CD burner and hook up my harddrive to his as a slave; then boot from his drive, asses and burn the files. i have a feeling your hard drive is dying, so back up any original, unreplaceable, personal data at all costs.