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Bad blocks - replace drive?

R

rhy7s

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 13, 2002
Messages
314
Just reviving an old 'puter and after a day or so of running on a fresh W2K SP4 install it blue screened with an atapi.sys error. On reboot BIOS drive detection couldn't pick up the HDD, couple more warm reboots didn't pick it up either. So I cut power and after a slight delay on cold boot the drive showed up in POST again. I ran the Fujitsu diagnostics from the UBCD which identified and repaired some bad blocks. Disk access now seems really slow and hesitant, would bad blocks be indicative of HDD decline? Would it be better to just slap a new drive in? I'm assuming a bad cable or ide header didn't play a part as errors were found on the disc. Is the poor performance likely to be just W2K getting itself sorted again after suffering the BSOD and repairs to the HDD?
 
The combination of new blocks going bad and the failure to be detected during POST would indicate a rapidly deteriorating drive. I'd replace it. Bad blocks can be normal, and usually they are identified, data is copied to a new location and the block is marked as bad and not used again all transparently, but it sounds as if they're going bad quickly or unpredictibly.
 
Yeah, I was assuming the drive was gonna end up toast. One of those annoying occasions when you sink time into hardware only to lose it to the gremlins.
 
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