Should I Be Worried About A Bad Cluster On My HDD Or Can My HDD Be Saved How To Remove Bad Sectors Or Bad Clusters From HDD

[iGuest 3]

Should I Be Worried About A Bad Cluster On My HDD Or Can My HDD Be SavedHow To Remove Bad Sectors Or Bad Clusters From HDD

Hi,

I have a bad cluster on my HDD 1TB external hard drive, its located in K/movies/jim carrey/cable guy. I am now running the  ,,western digital data lifeguard diagnostics - DLGDIAG for windows,, and its gonna take up to 8 hours.I just wanna know if this program (that came with the hard disk) will fix the damage or should I be worried? I asked here and there and I got 2 most common answers : the first answer is that the hard drive is beginning to fail and will eventually drop dead and the second one said its just a minor error and the diagnostics I'm running should fix it.

-question by gaby

 

[yordan 10]

A bad cluster is a place where the data cannot be written.

Currently, the disks are so huge that the amount of not usable space is negligible.

The disk formatting takes care of bad clusters, and the corresponding sectors are flagged as not to be used, and the operating system does not use them.

I the bad sectors were there before the disk formatting operation, it's not important for a standard user.

If bad sectors appear during the life of the disk, the corresponding data are lost. That's a reason why you must have a backup of each of your important data. If a file is corrupted, you can restore it from your backup. If you have no backup, the data are definitely lost.

So, the answer of your question is twofold.

First of all, do you have a copy of your important data? If not, make a copy of your important data as soon as possible.

Secondly, the disk can be saved by a disk check operation, which will flag the bad sectors as not to be used by the operating system.

And of course, some people will tell you that it's better to do a disk format, if that disk is not your operating system disk.