bad sectors on HDD?

[Edame]

I think my HDD may have some bad sectors on the drive, but I can't find a way to isolate them?

Whenever I run a defrag program it always hangs the computer at a certain point. It also hangs when I get down to a certain amound of HDD space, so if I download a large file and use up too much space, it hangs. I'm presuming that there's an area of the disc that the drive just can't access. Does anyone know of a program that can properly analyse my HDD and isolate the dodgy area so that I can avoid these crashes?

[Vaipon]

I wouldn't bother trying to isolate them tbh. Just get a new drive asap and copy as much stuff as you can salvage from the old drive across. Once you see bad sectors, it's basically the beginning of the end for that drive, and you don't want to continue using it at all if you can help it. Once a drive is "contaminated", and bads start to appear, it will only get worse. The drive will slowly fail completely, and It'll all end in tears if you try and put up with it. In my experience, "marking" bad sectors and working around them is incredibly ropey and definitely not advised.

The cost of new HDDs is really low at the moment. Just replace it.

[nick_the_judge]

run scandisk in DOS with a boot disk ie 95,98 or ME with this code line scandisk C: /autofix /surface this will isolate those bad blocks and try to recover any damaged data. then like the man says back up what u can and get a new drive. 120 gig i got last week for a mate ?70 that was a maxtor 7200rpm

[DaveW]

chkdsk /f for WinNT/2K/XP.

But yeah, like Vaipon said once a drive starts to get bad sectors it will only get progressively worse. Bad sectors will keep appearing until they fuxor something really important like your hive files.