How do I fix a bad sector on my hard drive?

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samsung make a diag tool sugest you who have samsung go to web site its a dos based tool for sam sung drives

Use HDD Regenerator. Its a physical bad sector recover tool. I have recovered more than 1000 bad sectors from my drive. Must Check this.

i have a 40 gb hard disk there are many bad sector in hard disk so give me a advise how to remove a bad sector . but win98 setup in not complete. so give me advise how to complete setup

SpinRite, mentioned in the article, does not require a working operating system - it provides its own boot disk. I would try that.

On Windows XP, I'd start with a "chkdsk /R". (/R: "Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information"). Fire up a command prompt to run that command.

Under Windows 9x, (95, 98 and Me) I believe scandisk has an option to do a surface scan and repair as well.

use a win 98 start up disk (remember u will loos all files on this hhd when it is done it will be blank)

In days of old using Format /C would make the hard drive recheck areas suspected bad, however this was FAT32 not NTFS and does seem a tad drastic unless you can shift the data onto another source. you would need to refat the hdd using a 98se bootdisk first before using the above command.

I should mention that in rare situations software bad sectors can be created this was a problem back with Windows 98 where if your drive was not installed with LBA in the bios 98 could write software bad sectors to the disk hense causing performance issues and crashes proving the not all bad sectors are fatal.

I used Bnytech Inc in NYC for this job A+++ for small ammount.

One concern I have with Leo's response here:

By the time a disk utility or operating system is reporting bad sectors on a modern hard disk, the pool of spare sectors held in reserve HAS ALREADY BEEN USED UP.

The drive firmware will use these sectors on-the-fly as it detects bad or failing sectors during normal use, and it does this completely transparently to both the operating system and the user. Only when the pool of spare sectors is completely exhausted will bad sectors be reported to the operating system (and from there to the user).

Other than this minor nit, the rest of Leo's advice is spot on.

I have a drive that i think has bad sectors on it and i can't use any load windows on it at all , i tryed to put it in my other computer and do it that way and it won't startup, Is there anyway to fix the bad sectors without windows?

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SpinRite - http://ask-leo.com/d-grc

Leo
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