Partition around Bad Sectors

[EMT]

My laptop's Toshiba HD went south again, no booting into Windows or anything. Don't know what caused it. I got my data off in Knoppix, and scanned (using a program I'm not quite familiar with) to find 4 bad sectors. Note that Toshiba doesn't put out any tools to scan or low-level format. Well, I could have bought a new drive... but I want to know what you guys think of what I've done instead so far.

The bad sectors were a little over 5% into the drive. I made 3 partitions:
First- 5% in
Second- Just a few tens of MB
Third- The rest (call it 94%) of the space.

So I installed Windows onto the third partition and put my virtual memory on the first, leaving the second one unformatted. Everything seems to be fine, but is this likely to work in the long run? Do bad sectors spread? Has anyone ever tried something like this?

[Tex]

If the drive is failing then yes the bad sectors will spread. Your problem is exactly why you low level format as that should lock out all the bad sectors for now. You can low-level with maxtors diagnostics program. It low levels other makes of drives also.

Tex

[EMT]

I hadn't known that--I'll look into using Maxtor's tool then. What makes the bad sectors spread from an unused partition where they won't after a low-level format?

[Straight_Man]

Most HDs have reserved space in small amounts for the case where a few sectors are bad out of the box. The drive can use SMART and use the reserved space instead of the bad sectors, and low-levelling causes the drive to do this. That is for a few or up to in some cases 100s of sectors of data space (depends on drive size and mfr and age of drive).

Here's what happens in a failure scenario-- media gets a bad place in it, then corrossion spreads (usually an older drive or a drive run in 80-100% humidity for quite a while--- and a drive run in real high humidity will get moisture inside through its air breather holes which is very ungood). Eventually, you get flakes of media that end up colliding with a read\write head in the drive and the drive is then ruined.

Because of the failure scenario, until you can get a new drive, I would do as Tex said and then NOT USE that first 5% for anything at all including virtual memeory which is a file on the HD.

[EMT]

The bad sectors are actually confined to that little second partition, though. Can the problem actually spread if that partition never gets formatted into anything usable?

[Tex]

yes if the drive is failing.

Tex

[edcentric]

Other than corrosion there are mechanical causes for bad sectors. If either of these is the case your drive will continue to get worse.
What you have done will work for now, but you need to order the new drive.

[godzilla525]

I had a maxtor 3.5" 80GB remap about 26 bad sectors within two months of installing it. No more developed after that, until two days after the warranty expired (3yr), when all of a sudden more showed up and continued until I replaced it.

I also went through two Travelstars, the latter developed bad sectors after an evil dried-out spindle bearing induced head crash (Man, I hate FD bearings). I still use it, although in an external USB2 box for non-critical stuff.

// ya takes your chances...

[EMT]

Ought to tell the rest of the story: In short, you guys were right, it got worse. For some reason, it waited until I happened to reinstall Windows in March, at which point the HD just started acting reeeally slow much too often, and later making awful noises, then finally corrupting my registry (all in the space of about 3 days)... but in any case, replacing the drive is really the only lasting solution for this kind of problem.

[Enverex]

Hehehe, this brings back memories of when my 540MB drive was failing on my Amiga, repartitioning the drive around the clusters of bad sectors... but lets say the drive didn't last long afterwards anyway, I still have it around here but it can't even report it's name right anymore, so yeah, it's a bit dead.