Bad Hard Drive Sectors?

[BruisedQuasar]

It has been a few years since I heard of a HDD having bad sectors. Can anyone tell me if it is time to shop for a new Thinkpad hard drive when a top utility reports xxx bad sectors on the hard drive?

[icantux]

That could be true. Don't give up too quickly though. I would propose you run a chkdsk session to see if that clears up the problem. That may clear up some bad sectors on the drive.

If not, then a more comprehensive test is in order. One option is to run Hitachi's drive fitness test to see what the results are (you can download that here: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/technolo/dft/dft.htm <-- it ought to work on any drive, not only their own). This comprehensive test will indicate a potential hard drive failure.

[Kyocera]

I had a 20g laptop HD that was acting weird, no noise, just data all over the screen. Used partition commander to scan it and found a lot of bad sectors. I tried different tools to fix but never could fix

[turbolium]

i still have my first 10gig laptop HD (made by IBM)
it has some bad sectors but in last 5 years i never had a problem with it and still using it as a back up in external HD