# Bad boot secter



## Bigdog (Sep 20, 2003)

I have a HD that i put win7 on had some problems and reformatted it. Then i could not do anything with it have been fighting it for a week I have used Partition magic, and seagate to format it but no luck Need to know how to format this HD that will let me install with win7 disk

i have tried with pri and as a data disk as a long shot

thanks Bigdog


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## mnn2501 (Apr 2, 2008)

Get to a command prompt and type format c:


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## farmerj (Aug 20, 2011)

get a new hard drive and start fresh. Especially how cheap they have become.

Bad sectors are signs of a drive starting to fail.


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## Bigdog (Sep 20, 2003)

So guess i will see if i can fix it

Bigdog


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## Harry Chickpea (Dec 19, 2008)

toss it. and skip partition magic. I used to use it but discovered it created more problems than it solved.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

One bad sector is not a sign of a drive about to fail. The drive is supposed to remap bad sectors on its own, but sometimes they won't do it without a little encouragement in the form of a byte-by-byte write/read test. There's a little Linux program called badblocks that should be on most Linux live CD's, but for Windows you'd have to poke around the web and see what's available. Or maybe the Seagate program you mentioned can do it.


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## Harry Chickpea (Dec 19, 2008)

The boot sector is critical to everything else on the drive. I'm cheap, but I'm not cheap enough to consider the stuff on a hard drive disposable. Blocking out bad sectors means having a valid map of where the bad sectors exist. Guess where...?


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

Harry Chickpea said:


> The boot sector is critical to everything else on the drive. I'm cheap, but I'm not cheap enough to consider the stuff on a hard drive disposable. Blocking out bad sectors means having a valid map of where the bad sectors exist. Guess where...?


The drive knows better than you do what it can remap and keep working reliably. If a drive remaps a bad sector, any sector anywhere on the disk, and gives no reason to think it might not be reliable, it makes no sense to throw it away. But if it makes you feel better, by all means feel free to do so.


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## Steve in PA (Nov 25, 2011)

Google "TestDisk". That program has saved my butt more than once.


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## farmerj (Aug 20, 2011)

backwoodsman7 said:


> The drive knows better than you do what it can remap and keep working reliably. If a drive remaps a bad sector, any sector anywhere on the disk, and gives no reason to think it might not be reliable, it makes no sense to throw it away. But if it makes you feel better, by all means feel free to do so.


To each there own.

After building components for all the HD manufacturers', I learned a long time ago, bad sectors lead to a bad HD eventually. Enough so, I just replace them since they are cheap now relatively speaking.

When a drive would have cost you several hundred a piece to replace, it made sense. Not anymore.

Since it's failing anyway, really treat yourself and go SSD.


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