Hi! I have a hard drive with bad sectors. Is it possible somehow to isolate that bad sectors? Are there any programs? Thank you Artashes

Knowing how old your hard disk is and what File System you are using would help. When a disk is formatted, space is reserved for the re-allocation of bad sectors. This is done transparently by firmware in the hard disk controller. Once this space is full, subsequent bad sectors will begin to show. Once a bad sector has been identified, it will not be used by the Operating System although you will have lost some data that was on the sector before it went bad. Try running chkdsk and see if that does any good. Once bad sectors begin to show, you can be sure that there will be more to follow, so make sure you have backups of any important data. Stuart

If you have a hard drive with bad sectors, give it up. You probably don't realize that how much speed you are losing as they are passed over, and the cost of a new 80 gb hard drive today for ide, which is really obsolete is about $40 on eBay(just bought an 80 gb new WD 8 meg cache for $37.50) and a bit more at an online merchant. It is ridiculous to nurse an old hard drive today!

A method I use to isolate bad sectors is too place the bad sectors in a partition and hide the partition.

Thank you for your advices. I have a new hard drive, but it was just pitty to throw my old drive, and I thought that it'll be possible to cure it. Artashes

Wizard Fred, When a 3 Gb hard drive cost $125, making a folder or partition for bad sectors would have been considered ingenious. Now that big drives are so reasonable, and I might also add the quality went down with the price, it isn't worth the risks of losing data to save the drive.

Rich: Off course replacement is the best solution. However if there are only a few bad sectors and they don't grow, isolating them does provide a more problem free environment. I've done this at the beginning of a drive that had problems booting when cold and in a laptop (386sx-16) that had a 80MB drive with a bad spot about 35MB in. I have 32 MB primary, about 8 MB excluded, Then the remainder in an extended partition. This drive is still working after more than 5 years. DOS6-Win 3.1 It just used as scratchpad.