Question about Disk Defragmenting...

[Sean]

Ok, some of you may know that I just re-installed a fresh copy of Win98SE on the old dell I have. Well, I was trying to defragment the hard drive today, and it said there were errors I had to fix before it could finish. Here's what it says when I try:

Windows cannot defragment this hard drive because there are error that must be repaired first. (then it asks me to get help, and try again). ID No: DEFRAG004

Ok, now what really disappoints me, is that this used hard drive we bought, and wait 3 weeks for has 300,000 (actaully a little more) bytes in bad sectors!!! Could this be why? This is the hard drive I just installed. It did the same thing on the old drive that we were replacing.. Or, could it be the computer possibly?

Also, are bad sectors really bad, should I ask for a refund because the person didn't tell me about it? Or, does it not really matter?

Any help would be great!!

[FlyingPenguin]

I'd be a bit suspicious that it's not the drive if your old drive had the same problem.

The OS can be "fooled" into thinking there's bad sectors by other things - a bad IDE cable, a bad power connector on the drive, or a bad controller.

Having your PCI bus clock speed set incorrectly can also cause bad sectors.

Getting some bad sectors is not neccessarily a bad thing, but if the number of bad sectors continues to grow then you have a problem. If they're real physical bad sectors, then the drive probably suffered a disk crash and the debris from that crash (fine particles scraped from a disk platter) is floating around in there and can get caught between the heads and the platter causing more damage.

[Sean]

Ah, yes. I could probably check the ATA cord. It's not the BUS speed, cause I can't change it on the Dell. It could be a bad controller too. Cause this Dell has had some pretty bad crashes. I could always try getting an ATA100 controller, couldn't I? Would ATA33 devices work on it, cause it's backward compatible?

[hammer01]

Yes it is Sean, and I have had similar problems as well and many times it turns out to be one of the aforementioned problems. Just don't wanna see ya RMA the hdd and that won't cure your problem.

[Sean]

Thanks.