"Stephen Lee -- post replies please" wrote in message
According to mm :
(Chris Lewis) wrote:
The clicking is most likely retries (ie: gouged media, weak magnetics).
You _can't_ fix that. You're unlikely to be able to repair even obvious
It only clicks if I try to access the bad partition, and even then not always .
I can read the good partitions, but I'm told the clicking will get worse.
The exact same thing happened to me. I was copying stuff off one of my old
Seagate HDD, and there is one file that XP can't read, saying ECC error. I
ran Seatools http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/ on the drive and it
identified 2 bad sectors with full diagnostic. I was able to get the file
off the drive by having Seatools force a remapping of the bad sectors.
The remapped sectors are zeroed, so you're getting the file damaged, but it
is better than not getting anything at all. The good thing is Seatools
tries to identify and tell you which file is affected (although in short 8.3
name only), so you can decide if you want to risk it or not.
As for whether it will get worse, it depends on what caused the error. If
it was just a transient glitch that caused the drive to make a bad write, it
could be that it will develop no more error afterwards. If, say, the drive
electronics is failing, you'll see more and more bad sectors (thus more
clicking when you access previously-okay files).
HDDs are cheap enough nowadays that I wouldn't risk my data on such a
drive, but YMMV.
Strange how you have no such concerns with risking your data on a new drive
without checking your powersupply/supply of power first.
Stephen