MassiveProng wrote:
On Sat, 7 Apr 2007 09:15:15 -0500, "Anthony Fremont"
Gave us:


I maintain scores of pcs, drive failures are common in "my little
circle". I'm not just talking "dead" drives, but ones that develop
bad sectors visible to the OS. Look at your system logs in xp for
any "disk" errors. They'll show up there and xp won't say a thing
about it other than that. It'll just keep on retrying the same dead
sectors, it's pitiful.


That makes me even more glad to be running Vista then.

I don't know for sure yet, but I'm don't have high expectations. Watch your
system logs and see.

Also, you still using FAT32?!

Unfortunately not. The xp machines all have NTFS filesystems, one only has
to do a search to see how slow it is.

AFAIK NTFS drives don't have the same problems, and the hard drive
itself is supposed to map out bad sectors automatically, and
transparently on a well designed and manufactured drive.

IDE drives do exactly that. When the OS starts seeing the bad space, it's
because the drive has run out of room to remap the bad sectors. Almost all
drives have some bad sectors on them, but the hardware automatically remaps
the space. There is only so much room in the tables and only so many spare
sectors.

My latest fun venture involved a drive with legitcheckcontroll.dll stored in
the bad area. Made for much fun with WGA authentication updates. Something
to the effect of "M$ cannot verify the authenticity of this copy windows
blah blah blah.....". It wouldn't come out and say that it was a bogus copy
(which I knew full well was legitimate), it did make threatening remarks
about it. I ghosted the drive to a new one and suddenly all was well with
applying the WGA Notification garbage and then the threatening remarks
suddenly went away. They suck......