At 11:17 PM 10/6/2005 -0400, James Knott wrote:
James Wright wrote:
Anyways, what can I do to find out if I have a physical problem with my drive, and if I do, can I mark a section of the hard drive as 'bad' so that it will not be used? I can't afford a new hard drive, and desperately need this laptop as it is my only computer. Thank you for any help or suggestions.
I don't know about marking a section bad, but you can alway create a partition containing the bad area and just not use it.
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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. --doug -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.13/123 - Release Date: 10/6/2005