Hello,

As HDDSCAN 2.7 has confirmed my hard-disk has several bad sectors, 3 so far, since the scan hasn't finished.

I suspected this was the case since my computer has been acting in a strange way of late.

When reaching one of those sectors something clicks in my PC, my screen goes complete blank and its indicator begins to twinkle on and off.

Is there any possibility I may be able to restore those sectors? How do I know what type of damage has my HD suffered? Is it always physical?

Thanks for your help.

Well there,

bad sector count has gone sky-high: 172452. All of the but three at the end of the HD.

Is it SCSI, Desktop IDE or Laptop IDE??? Manufacturer and model # would help. Do you need the data on the drive???

Desktop IDE (I guess, it's a PC).

This is the information I get when using Everest Ultimate Edition 2006. I hope it's all you need to lend me a hand, if can be.

Field Value
ATA Device Properties
Model ID ST3160812A
Serial Number 5LS17WST
Revision 3.AAD
Device Type ATA-100
Parameters 310101 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 512 bytes per sector
LBA Sectors 312581808
Buffer 8 MB
Multiple Sectors 16
ECC Bytes 4
Max. PIO Transfer Mode PIO 4
Max. UDMA Transfer Mode UDMA 5 (ATA-100)
Active UDMA Transfer Mode UDMA 5 (ATA-100)
Unformatted Capacity 152628 MB

ATA Device Features
SMART Supported
Security Mode Supported
Power Management Supported
Advanced Power Management Not Supported
Write Cache Supported
Host Protected Area Supported
Power-Up In Standby Not Supported
Automatic Acoustic Management Not Supported
48-bit LBA Supported
Device Configuration Overlay Supported
Native Command Queuing Not Supported

ATA Device Physical Info
Manufacturer Seagate
Hard Disk Name Barracuda 7200.9 160812
Form Factor 3.5"
Formatted Capacity 160 GB
Disks 1
Recording Surfaces 2
Physical Dimensions 146.99 x 101.6 x 26.1 mm
Max. Weight 580 g
Average Rotational Latency 4.16 ms
Rotational Speed 7200 RPM
Interface Ultra-ATA/100
Buffer-to-Host Data Rate 100 MB/s
Buffer Size 8 MB

ATA Device Manufacturer
Company Name Seagate Technology LLC
Product Information http://www.seagate.com/products

Bad sectors can often be corrected by using a spare sector built into the drive. However, any information written to a bad sector is usually lost. You can use the Remap option within MHDD, or the ERASE WAITS option. If you data is valuable to you you may want to copy the data off or possibly clone your disk to another.

you can get lots of information on fixing bad sectors in the MHDD FAQ at the start of this forum