Dear All, Can any hardware pro advice me on the causes of bad clusters. The reason I am asking this is because I am force to change my hardisk (TWICE!!!) due to bad clusters. So, I am looking for a way to reduce the occurance of bad clusters... or find out the real culprit behind it. The hardisk I am using is 60GB 7200 rpm Western Digital. I have tried my best not to bump on the table while my computer is running. Any advice will be greatly appreciated. Regards, EK

many HDD's come from the factory with bad clusters on them. Western Digital, in my experience has always been the worst about this. corrupted data could cause clusters to go bad, so take care when you're installing/uninstalling. try another HDD manufacturer like SEAGATE or Maxtor.

Dan, thanks for your advice! EK

Have you ran fdisk and formatted the drive then checked for bad clusters again? These can be reported when a data segment has become corrupted or the partition table is damaged, in which case the drive may need to be repartitioned. Western digital has a special tool to look for and correct this type of issue on they're drives. Another cause not related to the drive could be a problem with the IDE controller on the system board. Now if it is an actual bad cluster on the drive surface then it could be caused by several things. Including a defective power supply or power problem on the system board, Onboard controller problem on the drive or just plain bad luck with defective hard drives.

Lee, I have formatted my hardisk but I did not do fdisk because I still have data in other partitions. But it all happen is C: drive ... and nowhere else. I might try to repartition the drive this weekend and see what happen.... in the meantime I will get the tools from western digital website. Thanks! EK