Hi Nick, On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 08:00:10PM +0000, thegeeksquad...@ymail.com wrote: > Just curious to know this, as I don't format disks too often, but does > formatting a HD rid it of any bad sectors? I assume not, but I'm a tad > perplexed!
Not as such. Also it depends what you mean by "format". By "format", most people mean just creating a partition table. This doesn't write to the whole disk, so can't actually do anything to (most of) the disk. If you try to write a bad sector on a modern disk then it will usually remap that sector to one from its pool of spare sectors. That has the appearance of "fixing" the sector. It's normal for this to happen very rarely over the whole life of the drive. When there is serious damage to the mechanism of the drive, the errors can come in a flood and deplete all the spare sectors quickly, which is why it's important to replace a drive when the remapped sectors count keeps going up. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting "The electric guitar - like making love - is much improved by a little feedback, completely ruined by too much." -- The League Against Tedium
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