Windows 7: Windows 7 finally installed. Bad sectors?

So if you read my other thread you would see I've been having problems with installing a fresh OS because my harddrive. When I began the clean installation process my hard drive started clicking periodically (which didn't happen till I started) I was able to partition around these bad sectors and get the OS installed. I am now sitting at a clean desktop with the computer running fine.



However, I know that these bad sectors will cause problems later and I'm wanting to know what I should do now. Is there anything I can do to kill these bad sectors and ensure my hard drive to stay proper? I realize that this shows my hard drive is going bad, but I feel if I can get this taken care of then I can keep the hard drive a while longer. What should I do?

I am noticing slight hard drive activity when sitting at a clean desktop with nothing loading and nothing done on it since the clean install. I'm not sure if this is bad but I would like to do all I can to ensure the hard drive remains in operating condition for as long as possible. I intend to get a new computer soon. But I'm not sure when and would not like to buy a new hard drive for a computer I'll be replacing.

anybody?

Hi,

The first thing you can do, is run a chkdsk /R from an elevated command prompt. You will be prompted as to whether you wish to schedule a disk scan at the next bootup - you should answer "Y".

At next bootup, chkdsk will run and located bad sectors, and then mark them such that information will not be written to them.

You should also run Crystal Disk Info to produce a general report of the health status of your disk.

Regards,
Golden

I did that already. And I notice the computer runs with no noise except when it begins to idle. Like if I let it sit with no activity it will start that clicking.

Hi,

There are two possibilities:

1. The disk is indexing whilst idle (normal)
2. The disk is about to fail (bad)

Until you post back the requested image, we can only guess.

Regards,
Golden


Regards,
Golden

You can also use some software to fix any bad sectors found. My favorite is HDD Regenerator 1.70, however as far as i know it's not freeware, and most of all it takes a long time to complete. But it does fix any drive (except track 0 failures)