Hi I just received a hd as a gift. It was a used unit so I hooked it up and imediately ran a scandisk on it using win98se. Scan said that there were no errors but there were 1.800.000 bytes in bad sectors. Will a format recover these sectors or is scandisk mistaken and all is fine. I want to use the disk as a back up for documents and other items that I don't want to loose. Thanks in advance

Errors and bad sections are two different things. Errors would be software problems - like mistaken memory readings. Bad sectors are hardware related - physical problems with the disk sectors. This can happen from power surges, bad shutdowns, etc. There should be an option for blocking the bad sectors so that data doesn't get put there. Bad sectors can't be repaired - they're just bad.

Run scandisk 'Thorough' on the drive. It will make a check of all sectors and recover the ones it can. Be prepared for a long wait. If you get dozens of bad sectors you might consider trashing the drive.

Norton Disk Doctor (a component of Norton Utilities) is an able alternative to Scandisk. It's marginally faster. Both NDD and Scandisk make bad sectors unusable. But the hard drive remains unreliable.

Thanks for all the information. It is a small drive so I will probably just trash it. I was also told that once a drive starts to go, it will probably just get worse.

I got 20 Gb for $99. If your data is important, it beats risking it. It is big enough so that you can create several partitions and backup your data separate from Windows.

If the spot is physically bad it can't be recovered but sometimes for reasons unknown spots are marked bad that really aren't. Whenever I get a drive with bad spots I do a low level format, then fdisk and format. About 25% of the time the drive turns out to be perfectly fine. Just for the heck of it you might try that.