Some questions concerning defective sectors on an internal HD

I bought a 300GB internal Maxtor drive in autumn 2005.
It's not the system drive, I use it only for storing large files under
XP and Linux.
It's formatted as FAT32 with Linux mkdosfs (but I don't think that the
high level formatting is relevant here).

Today I looked into the Windows event protocol and recognized, that on
18.09.2006 chkdsk found 12 KB of defective sectors on this drive (I
think this was one of these Autochk disk checks that XP
does sometimes after booting). Today, chkdsk /r found the same 12
defective sectors, so at least there
is no new damage in the last 9 months. I downloaded the Maxtor (=Seagate
today) diagnostic tool (for Windows) and ran
the simple (=no risk for data) tests, and at least the two more
comprehensive tests failed, so I'm quite sure that chkdsk tells the
truth.

I have several questions in context with this problem:

1) The help page of the Seagate tool offers the possibility to "repair
sectors in most cases" with the DOS version of the tool.
I always thought that you can't really solve a hardware failure by
software, but only sidestep it.
Is it really possible (for any tool) to repair sectors in most cases or
do you think this is only another expression for
"doing a low level format and making the defective sectors invisible to
a high level formatting program"?

2) Perhaps I could save the data on several slower drives and then do a
low level format.
But now that Windows chkdsk has marked these
sectors as defective they won't be used for storing (even not when
writing with Linux on the disk (?)),
so I would not see any advantage in a low level formatting.
Am I right with this?

3) I have warranty from my computer store on the drive (and also the
warranty from Maxtor), but can I claim without reasonable doubt that
with 12KB of defective sectors that drive is defective (in your opinion,
of course different countries may have different judges) ? Or do you
think the store owner could argue that this one time event may have been
caused by other
reasons (but I find no other critical events near this date in the
application event protocol) and that I should wait until new defective
sectors occur?

And a similar question:
If you were me, would you change the drive, or would you think that 9
months without new defective
sectors is sign enough that the other sectors are sane?
After all it would be very annoying to lose a 1GB-movie by some KB of
defective sectors.


4) (Sorry if a little bit off topic here)
Why doesn't XP tell me what it does and, more specifically, that it
does a chkdsk after booting?
I disabled the bootsplash Microsoft Logo
but all I'm seeing when XP starts are some driver loading messages and
then a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner,
finally (sometimes after hours when chkdsk is at work) the blue welcome
screen.

How can I configure XP to proceed as with Win9x (=DOS) scandisk, that is
telling me that it is checking this or that drive, how far it has gone
with this, asking me if I want to do the suggested changes or, at the
very least, tell me afterwards with a popup that it has found defects
and has changed something?

Thank you in advance
Bernd

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: CHKDSK results
    ... Run chkdsk again, and often for a few weeks. ... The 32k in bad sectors though, is unusual but, as I said, not ... Technically it shouldn't happen on today's better drives. ... disk dies and you lose all the data. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Is there a better disk-maintenance utility than Chkdsk out there?
    ... I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that contain data. ... Using an IDE to USB adapter, I formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors. ... Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used to? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Chkdsk doesnt find bad sectors in unused space
    ... I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that contain data. ... Using an IDE to USB adapter, I formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors. ... Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used to? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: Is there a better disk-maintenance utility than Chkdsk out there?
    ... I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad ... formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no ... found bad sectors. ... Though I have no doubt that Spinrite is a good utility... ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Is there a better disk-maintenance utility than Chkdsk out there?
    ... I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad ... formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no ... found bad sectors. ... Though I have no doubt that Spinrite is a good utility... ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)