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From: Rod Speed on 27 Dec 2006 14:12
Keith <here(a)there.com> wrote
> Rod Speed wrote
>> Keith <here(a)there.com> wrote

>>> My Win XP Pro PC suffered a BSOD yesterday telling me that part of
>>> the registry was corrupted. I restored the OS from my Acronis True
>>> Image backup but the bad sector count has increased from 3 to 5. Not knowing much about these
>>> things, is it time to buy a new HDD?

>> Depends on what is producing the bads. If its external to the drive like a bad power supply,
>> mains surges etc, best to fix that and the drive will be fine.

> Thanks Rod. It's a "store bought" Sony VAIO desktop PC and the other HDD is fine.

Same model or different ?

> Would you happen to know if Sony's power supplies were prone to being flaky?

They arent anything specially on that.

> I have so much surge protection on everything I don't think it's that.

And you had more show up when you would presumably have noticed a surge too.

Most likely the drive is dying.


From: James Brown on 27 Dec 2006 14:09
Arno Wagner <me(a)privacy.net> wrote:
> Previously Al Dykes <adykes(a)panix.com> wrote:
>> In article <4vd690F1bj72mU1(a)mid.individual.net>,
>> Arno Wagner <me(a)privacy.net> wrote:
>>> Previously Keith <here(a)there.com> wrote:
>>>> Arno Wagner wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> This one may completely healty, but the pending sectors are
>>>>> suspicuous. Best run a long-smart self-test. It will do a comlete
>>>>> surface scan. Lets see whether the pending sectors turn into bad
>>>>> ones. As it is, the disk has zero bad sectors and this may be
>>>>> some other problem, e.g.
>>>>> a driver issue or a controller problem. Post the SMART status of
>>>>> this disk and the self-test log here, after running the test.
>>>>> This may very well be a temporary failure, e.g. from a
>>>>> power-spike on writing or the like. The long SMART self-test
>>>>> should identify that....
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>
>>>> Hi Arno and thanks for your reply. Total newbie here, how do I go
>>>> about running a "long-smart self-test"? I have EVEREST Home
>>>> Edition.
>>>
>>> No idea. I use the smartmontools, there it is just
>>> "smartctl -t long <device>"
>>>
>>> Arno
>
>
>> Got backup? I think you'll need it soon.
>
>> I agree with the testing. I get the make and modek of the disk and
>> them go to the manufacturer's web site and download their test tool.
>> It's frequently called "drive fitness dest".
>
>> You run it and it makes a bootable floppy or CD. Boot it and you can
>> run read-only tests if you have data you want to save or run several
>> passes of the write/read test to see if the drive is worth keeping.
>
>> I don't use a disk that's ever shown one bad sector for anything
>> important after I've swapped it out of service.
>
> Agreed. But so far the disk has no bad sectors.

Corse it has, they just havent been reallocated yet,
normally because they havent been written to yet.

> Might be something else entirely...

Correct.


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