Problem with sectors..

[SE14man]

Hi,

Just got a new 40GB WD HDD.
Cloned C: onto it (It's E
The reason i cloned is because C: had a bad sector (i think)
I scanned C: on Easy Recovery a few weeks back to find it said: I/O Error on the sector it was on.
I bought a new drive (The Western Digital)
Cloned C: onto it.
Scanned the new drive set as a master (The new drive was E: and is now C: as i cloned C: onto it) so i now only have 1 drive connected and that was the destination drive i cloned to.
Doing a scan with Easy Recovery it has come up with a bad sector. (I/O Error on the sector number)
Now i thought sectors was hardware damage.
How can it clone a bad sector over?
Can someone explain it to me and why its doing it?
Would deleting the partition help it?

[redwudz]

Usually when the OS tells you it has a bad sector that means it's used all the spare sectors already and the disk has problems. Normally bad sectors are just mapped out and you won't know it. When it runs out of open sectors to map to is when it notifies you.

I never seen a transfer of a bad sector to another disk, but it may be possible. A single sector is usually 512 bytes, so you won't miss a few. You might try a different program to scan the disk or just use the OS error checking program. (Right click on the drive>Properties>error checking. Check both boxes.)

More about sectors here:http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_disk_sector_structures.htm

[Bjs]

Its xp related ... in order for that to be removed , you need to do a complete clean reinstall of xp ...

I found the same thing a couple of months back when working with drive imaging ... a tool ??? has reported bad sector at ??? , and cannot be repaired by this tool ...

I think at the time I was using western digitals utilities to test the drive prior to installing into another pc I built ...

Xp has a logging ability as to where damaged sectors are located , and I am sure microsoft is aware of the issue ... cause I told them ...

Wether they fix it is another thing ...

[thevoelk]

Bad sectors don't get copied. When Windows formats a drive, they are marked. Every drive coming out of the manufacturing plant has a few bad sectors, it's inherent to the manufacturing process. Bad sectors are a physcial problems, like a slight surface scratch, a piece of dust on the disk itself, not something sofware does to your drive. If you converted that drive to a Unix/Linux partition, you would still have bad sectors.

I think NTFS partitions can mark bad sectors as they're being written to, so just saving data can help mark bad sectors. Like redwudz said, a sector is so small you'll never miss one or two of them.

If you truly cloned the drive, for your problem to even be in the realm of possibility, the bad sectors would have to be the exact same sectors. Even if they are, it is more coincidence than cloning a bad sector. Now cloning corrupt data is a possibility, which may be what you have done. I have seen Windows see data it "doesn't understand" as being corrupt.

Long story short, your drive is fine, just continue to keep your data backed up and you won't have much to worry about.