Help Topic: "Bad Sector Found"

IMPORTANT: Please read and carefully consider all of the following information about your "Bad Sector Found" options.

A bad sector is a small area on the disc drive that is reporting errors and cannot be accessed properly. New bad sectors, sometimes called grown defects, are often caused by some kind of physical damage. If a file or folder uses this sector, then the file is already incomplete or corrupt because the bytes are not readable.

*** NOTE **** The following information applies only to Seagate Technology, Samsung or Maxtor brand disk drives:

When SeaTools discovers a bad sector through reading, at the end of the scan it displays a list of the bad sectors.

If a sector is in use, then that file is incomplete or corrupt. When a bad sector happens to align with a folder or directory listing structure, then the links to files and sub-folders it manages may be broken. Sectors are often not in use.

You should carefully consider the importance of your data. While the sector is currently unreadable, if the file or folder is important to you then you may need professional recovery services to possibly reclaim the data. In this case, select NO to exit without trying to reallocate blank replacement sectors on the drive.

If you have decided that the file or folder is replaceable, already backed up or just not important to you, then you can tell SeaTools to attempt to overwrite the sector.

By design, modern disc drives maintain spare sectors for reallocation purposes. Usually, sectors become difficult to read long before they become impossible to read. In this situation the actual data bytes in the sector are preserved and transferred to the new spare during a sector reallocation. Similarly, when a disc drive writes data and encounters a problem, the drive firmware retires the problem sector and activates a replacement before giving successful write status.

If you give permission to overwrite a bad sector SeaTools will attempt to write a pattern of zeros to that sector. Usually, this action will assist the disc drive firmware in managing the problem by retiring the problem LBA and activating a spare in its place.

Note: Seagate Technology is not responsible for lost user data.