This is on a machine thats like 7 yrs old (not mine). It has Windows 98 installed on it and the hard drive is reporting bad sectors on the drive during scan disk. I don't know how many or often but apparently its constantly reporting bad sectors every time scan disk is run. Does this mean the hard drive is about to go bad? The PCs owner installed a second hard drive a while ago but never put anything on it. What is the best way to transfer everything including the O/S to the new drive? Or would you have to install Win98 on the new drive then back-up the old and run restore or whatever on the new one? I have never had a bad hard drive so I have never had to do this. Is it safer or better to buy software to do this (what software)? Thanks for pointing me in the right direction? I can get the system specs if you need them.

Sounds like the hard drive is on its last legs. The sooner you transfer to a new hard drive the better or you risk losing your data. Drive Image, Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage are utilities that will allow you to copy the existing hard drive with the OS to a new replacement hard drive. Some hard drive manufacturers also provide utilities that may allow you to do the same for free instead of having to buy the above named software titles. Look to see if your hard drive manufacturere has such a utility. You might however want to take the opportunity of a clean install which is a good way of having a clean junk free system. It is amazing how much rubbish and debris can collect in a hard drive. If you do a clean install then ensure you have your CD key and you have all the drivers you may require. You might also want to visit my website (Homepage link) which gives a checklist of what you should consider before doing a re-install. Hope it has helped. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

bas sectors have nothing to do with a hard disk going bad. the sector just simply has been written over too many times, worn out or something like that. You can just format the drive and itll ignor the bad sectors and write around them. I got a harddrive with very few bad sectors. I ran scandisk everyweek since that happened. And you know how many MORE bad sectors I discovered? Z-E-R-O

Found this... Interesting... Bad sector does not require physical drive damage. If the power loss or whatever interrupts a write operation, the following condition may occur: the sector data is (partially) written but checksums (ECC data) are not written yet. This sector will be considered bad by hard disk firmware. Manufacturers tools (and some third party are also available) may get rid of those, but this implies full erasure of the drive contents (most of the time). This is what is called low level format of the disk, and gives two things: 1. If ECC checksums are missing, they will be restored, returning the sector in service. 2. If the sector is physically damaged, it will be marked bad and replaced by the spare (if there are any spares), at the on-disk controller level, without OS intervention. If there are no spares left the sector will remain bad.

While it is true that the odd bad sector is harmless, it is certainly a risk, if in the face of continual occurances of fresh outbreaks of bad sectors, to persevere with the hard drive reporting the bad sectors. Under such circumstances I would draw the conclusion, as I have done, that the hard drive should really be replaced or at least not used as the main OS drive or one which has critical data on it. Before writing off the hard drive, it may be worth downloading the hard drive manufacturers hard drive testing tools and running the diagnostics (non-destructive at first) to see if the hard drive is reported bad or healthy. ___________________________________________ ☺ When everything else fails, read the instructions.

Mosaddique is correct, of course. Many new drives come with a few bad sectors. That's due to minor defects on the platters and are not a problem. New bad sectors that show up `are' a problem because they indicate that there is probably some particulate matter inside the drive that is causing the heads to damage the platters.

Hi, If the HD maker has a util, great. Otherwise, use SpinRite. If that doesn't save it, probably nothing will. M2