On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 06:01:28 -0600, "Jim Macklin"
All drives have some bad clusters, but they are mapped out
during formatting.
RUBBISH!! If they are visible at all, it's because one of:
- the number exceeds what can be replaced from spares
- they are newly-acquired, thus significant
The first is a HD that should never have passed QA, and the second is
a dying HD. The "normal" manufacture-level defects are handled
internally by modern HD and should never be visible.
If you have increasing numbers, then the
drive may have a problem.
That's like saying having chest pain is OK, but if you can't feel a
pulse and start losing consciousness, you may need to see a doctor.
"Lori A. Kuiper" <
[email protected]> wrote in message
| Just loaded XP Professional on New Hard Drive--Western
Digital 120GB. Bio
| recognizes the drive as full 120GB. Everything on PC is
new.
| In setup log I notice that it shows 8k file fragments
| found. This is brand new drive. Is this normal for large
| drives. I spoke to someone and they said it is normal for
| XP to show errors on large drives?
Depends on the error, and size has nothing to do with it.
The file system exists at one level of abstraction, but underneath it
is the physical drive itself. It's important to determine at which
layer the errors are coming from.
The most common (and benign) errors arise when normal file operations
on a healthy HD are interrupted by a crash, reset, or power off. XP's
auto-ChkDsk that follows a bad exit assumes this is what it is dealing
with, and NTFS's magical self-fixing is based on this ASSumption.
On FAT32, these file system logic errors fall into this category:
- incorrect free space (safe to fix)
- lost cluster chains (safe to fix)
- incorrect file length ("fix" leaves damaged file undetectable)
Less benign file system errors arise when hardware is defective, e.g.
bad RAM, or programs go seriously haywire before being detected as off
the rails and terminated by the OS:
- cross-linked files (one or both will be damaged)
- mismatched FAT (expect file that look OK to be garbaged)
None of the above indicate physical HD defects, but this does:
- bad clusters (remapped to other clusters)
Don't confuse lost cluster chains with bad clusters; the first may be
the expected fall-out from "bad exits" from Windows, but the second
means the HD is physically deteriorating and should be replaced.
NTFS errors will differ, for two reasons:
- different file system structure; no FATs, free space value etc.
- ChkDsk doesn't prompt when errors found
Most damningly, NTFS glosses over the most serious errors - physically
defective sectors - on the fly (not only when ChkDsk runs). When the
NTFS driver code can't read a sector easily (if at all), it
automatically remaps the contents to another sector.
This is seen as a "feature", but also means you do not get early
warning about something that is likely to kill your data, and could
delay detection of the problem beyond the end of the HD's warranty.
-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
Running Windows-based av to kill active malware is like striking
a match to see if what you are standing in is water or petrol.
