Bad Sector

Several months ago, I found that Norton Ghost failed to do one of it's scheduled backups. It was certainly running, because another backup (for a different drive) had backed up perfectly later the same night. I tried running the backups again with the same result. Checking the log confirmed that there was an error on the drive I was unsuccessfully attempting to backup.

I ran 'CHKDSK', but it failed to repair the error. So I ran Acronis Disk Director, which showed a single bad sector on the drive concerned. Now that disk is the original 10-year old 13GB drive, which has clearly exceeded its anticipated lifespan. And Ghost does offer an 'ignore bad sectors during copying' option which would have worked round the problem. But I didn't really want to go down that route; I felt that if I didn't remedy the fault immediately it would soon become beyond satisfactory resolution.

The online doom-and-gloom merchants all seemed to say the same thing: once you get a bad sector you need to change your hard drive pronto, or you'll lose the lot. Not a great problem, I had a recent backup of the disk that was error-free, but I didn't want the hassle or the expense; I seem to have spent too much time over the years tinkering with the innards of my PC for one reason or another. So I wiped the disk (using Disk Director from the boot - it was my C drive that was giving the problem), and then reformatted. Disk Director now showed the disk as error-free, and a restore from the Ghost image had everything back as it had been the week before. I only keep software on my C drive, so nothing lost from the seven days since that backup was made either. (Ed. See update below; wiping the unused portion of the drive is all that is required).

Well, that was 6 months ago, and the old Fujitsu hard drive is running as well as ever with no more problems at all. But this did encourage me to rethink the demands I place on the disk in terms of sheer usage. I haven't run the disk defragmenter since, I don't do full scans for viruses so regularly (just once a week now), and I generally try to be more selective in controlling background applications. I no longer leave Skype logged on as routine.

Do people really need to defragment their drives as often as many do? I doubt it somehow. Hardened games players may benefit from the increased speed but I doubt if the normal user notices any difference. And most people who defrag are doing so in the hope that it will solve other problems, such as the one that Microsoft Updates inflicts.

Changing the subject, the CISS is in my printer and working well. As soon as there's enough natural light to video it in action, I'll post in detail about the installation.

UPDATE: Since posting the above I have had two further bad sectors show up, on two different partitions across two further hard-drives. In each case, I have found that wiping the 'unused' section of the partition concerned cured the problem without any file removal whatever; clearly the problem lies (in my case at least) with the way the disks are storing the fragments of deleted files. For those that lack a disk wiping utility, I recommend Eraser by Heidi (a free download). It's probably the benchmark for such software. I'm using the 5.8.6 Beta with no problems whatever; I had to try several mirrors before I was able to get one that would actually give me the proper download (most but not all of those listed are free sites, so you don't need to pay).