[vox-tech] failing hard drive...

[Mark K. Kim]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 12:49:56PM -0800, Alex Mandel wrote:
> Henry House wrote:
> >P? 2006-12-08, skrev Rod Roark:
> >>On Friday 08 December 2006 11:52, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
> >>...
> >>>So I must have bad sectors somewhere in the physical region of the first 
> >>>partition.  Will this problem get worse and propagate to my other 
> >>>partitions?
> >>Um, yeah.  Back up anything you care about *immediately* and get a
> >>replacement drive ASAP.
> >>
> >>Most currently manufactured drives are quite good.  I've had good luck
> >>reliability-wise with Seagate.
> >
[snip]
> >heard from Ryan Castelluci that Seagates drives are the best bet for
> >reliability.
> >
> >
> I agree(Seagate) from experience and the fact that they have 5 year 
> warranties instead of the standard 3.

I fourth (or is it fifth?) the Seagate recommendation.  Had problems in
the past with Western Digital, Maxtor, IBM... haven't had problems with
Seagate [so far.]

To answer Jonathan's question: Yes, the problem will likely get worse
and propagate to other partitions, and it's not likely to be fixable
with any software.  Newer hard drives use software to map bad sectors of
the hard drives to the spare sectors normally inaccessible to the OS.
The hard drive automatically moves sectors it identifies to be bad (via
checksum) to the spare sectors and updates its bad-sector-to-spare-sector
map.  The Maxtor software complaining of a "failing" drive, combined
with Windows no longer booting, is probably the indication that there
are no more spare sectors.

-Mark