Getting bad sectors.

[Unfocused]

In a few minutes I'll be running the Seagate SeaTools Diagnostic Tool from the Ultimate Boot CD to fix some bad sectors I possibly have (explorer.exe errors while reading certain parts of the HDD, and a file I recently downloaded won't unpack due to read error; HDD fails the Short SeaTools test).

The thing is I did the same thing like three weeks ago as well as about 2 months before. Each time the errors got fixed without data loss, but it's a pain in the ass to diagnose again, what takes probably around 1,5 hours. I probably can't fix the problem with chkdsk, cause last time I checked, running chkdsk on startup to fix errors caused the PC to flash a blue screen in my eyes, before rebooting.

So I'm wondering - is that a hardware problem or is it the system that needs reinstalling (after all there is no data loss).

 

[Asus]

It isn't uncommon for a hard drive to loose sectors. When they are made there a number of bad sectors that get told not to be used and a drive has extra sectors when shipped to account for this. But you have to run a utility or something to tell the drive not to use those parts of the drive again. Even if you save the data that was there the drive will still try to use that sector in the future. Might have to do a format of the drive and boot sector though. It's too bad desktop drives are not like SCSI drives, they automatically find and weed out bad sectors.

If you get increasingly more and more bad sectors (after telling not to use known bad sectors) then the drive is on it's way south. Backup, pack up and get a new one. I mean the good sectors are still usable but you'd keep finding new bad sectors and have to run chdsk to fix data.