Bad Clusters (Was Re: Vista? Hello or goodbye?)

[Dave S]

I've done some more looking into this and found out why I can't resize
the drive.

The $Badclus file is actually an indicator of a bad cluster on the
hard drive.  In fact, there are three bad clusters, and I've run
"chkdsk /f /r /b" to reevaluate them and see, but to no avail: still
bad clusters.

So, the next question is what to do about this?

If you bought a laptop from someone on Ebay and it said "500GB hard
drive, good condition etc." with no indication that there were any bad
clusters on the hard drive, what would you do about it?  I'm inclined
to point out the bad clusters to the seller (who I've already given
positive feedback to) and ask if they are willing to do anything about
it?

For example, the cost of a replacement drive would probably be
£45-50ish, so perhaps something towards that like £20-£25 or so would
be reasonable?  Is it worth potentially getting into an Ebay dispute
for the sake of 3 bad clusters and £25?  (I actually don't know!)

These bad clusters were definitely on record in the MFT before the
laptop arrived with me (in fact, I can possibly go back through the
Events Viewer and find out when they appeared, since although the
system appears to be a clean install, it's still got events listed
back as far as 2008), but it may be hard to prove it.

My guess is that these bad clusters will most likely have come about
by the laptop getting bashed while in use, so it *might* not be a sign
that the hard drive is on the way out.  But on the other hand, the
only way to find out is to keep using it and see.

Or I could get another hard drive for it and chuck away (well,
Freecycle for someone who has lots of unimportant data to store and
doesn't mind about potentially losing it) a potentially OK 500GB
laptop drive.

It's been quite some time since I had any computer with bad clusters
on the hard drive (last one was a 386 with something like 300MB of
hard drive space when hard drives still cost £££!) so maybe it's not
quite as much of an issue these days with modern hardware.

If I take regular backups to an external hard drive / DVD and keep an
eye on it, could work out OK?  Or is that just crazy talk, likely to
end in tears, and a new hard drive is urgently needed?

Do you instantly replace any drive that gets bad sectors / clusters on
it, or do you wait and see?

Thanks again for the advices everyone!

~Dave


On 10 May 2011 09:54, Chris Strellis <Chris.Strellis at crystalvision.tv> wrote:
> That bro's got no dough to put on win 7(oh!) so go with the flow and put
> on XP pro yo!