Doug McGarrett wrote:
I would have to tell you that XP has been a very solid OS, even if you don't trust MS--as I don't either. There are programs--most of which run on some version of DOS or Windows--which will attempt to find bad sectors, etc. on a drive and mark them. Some of these may run from a floppy, and they may be available free--or maybe not. Try and Google for something that will find bad sectors. Then it may mark them, and protect from trying to format and use them. I'm not sure how this kind of thing works, but it was common 15 years ago, or so, when there were bad sectors frequently found on disks. I don't know if this technology will work for an NTFS file system, or whatever MS uses to format a drive. (It's _not_ fdisk anymore.) I would be unhappy with a drive that had bad sectors in this modern age. I wouldn't trust it. Hard drives are not that expensive nowadays, even the ones that go in laptops. If I am in error here, please correct me.
My understanding is that modern drives automagically map out bad sectors and replace them with spares. And if a drive gets to the point where it runs out of spares and bad sectors become visible, the drive isn't long for this world. Also, formatting is supposed to identify and map out bad sectors. Incidentally, fdisk has never been used to format a drive. It is use to partition a drive. The command in Windows was and as far as I know still is, "format". In Linux, it's "mkfs".