Bad Sectors on Maxtor Harddrive

CM · #1 (**permalink**) 12-19-2003, 05:00 PM

I have basically 160 kb of bad sectors on my harddrive. This is my primary harddrive and i would like to "save" it. What can i do? I have already downloaded powermax from the Maxtor website and it gave me a code and told me to contact them. Now i rather not have to wait 3 bloody weeks a reply saying we cant help you.

So do you guys know of any way to recover or fix these bad sectors? If so how what program and what will happen to my data etc.

HighLordDave · #2 (**permalink**) 12-24-2003, 01:12 PM

Did Maxtor give you an RMA number? That means that Maxtor is going to replace your HDD under warranty. If you have bad sectors and Scandisk or some other disk utility won't fix them, then you probably have a physical problem with the drive.

You can either partition those sectors off as unusable space or replace the drive. 160 KB isn't a lot of space, so if you're not having any other problems you might want to keep the drive. The other thing to do is send the drive back, but that means you'll be without a HDD for 2-4 weeks (or whatever Maxtor's turnaround time is).

CM · #3 (**permalink**) 12-28-2003, 07:21 AM

Thanks HLD. However i got a program from Maxtor called Powermax. It cleaned my harddrive 100%, to factor specifications. It said it had all 0's now. So i guess it has to be formatted. I did this to both my harddrives. One was formatted by winxp and i insulted xp on to it. However now i cant find my other harddrive in windows.

One of my friends said i have to create it in windows, or windows has to detect it and format it. How exactly do i do that?

HighLordDave · #4 (**permalink**) 12-29-2003, 06:20 AM

First make sure your BIOS see the second HDD. If the BIOS don't see the drive, check your jumper settings and make sure that one drive is set to Master and the other to Slave.

If they're both in the BIOS, run the Windows XP setup and at one stage it will display all the drives, and their partitions. Your second drive may not be partitioned and formatted (running a low-level format, which is what it sounds like Powermax did, won't set up your file allocation tables so the Windows operating system can "see" the drive). Run the partition/format utility and you should be in business.