HD Bad Sectors

[Bluetack]

someone has given me a 10 gig HD with bad secorts on it, if i run a zero fill on it will it clear them up?

[pudds]

Unlikely, it might stop them being recognised as bad but this will just make things worse as data will be saved on these sectors. It may still work fine but don't store anything vital on it.
My old HD developed bad sectors and a few months after, the whole drive packed in:(

[Bluetack]

Pudds i have just read my post again and do you have any idea WTF secorts are :lol

[MTDay]

For some drives, there is a user bad block replament available, for others, the drive may still be in warranty - often 3 year.

If the drive was used in a malfunctioning or mis-set system, the bad blocks may be false - but only likely if the problems were serious - eg. mis-set to higher PIO mode than supported, or bad data cable.

Western Digital, Maxtor, and maybe Samsung have "fix utilities"

[Leonidas]

Try using FDISK to delete then replace partitions thaen you can do a clean format without dos finding hidden partiton info.

Then if they are real bad sectors/clusters you know you have a suspect drive only fit for none esential files / programs taht you have on FD ot CD.

[Bluetack]

i have fdisked it then formated it, dos tryed to recover clusters (whatever) a zero fill writes a 0 (there is a supprise) to every single block on the HD and truly rids it of data, like an old low level format but a bit higher!

I think its knackered :( not to worry chaps thanks for the help :)