^ you don't isolate a partition. you isolate a few clusters. Say your cluster no. 123456 is damaged. I wud suggest to make your partitions between say clusters 0 to 123454 and
123458 and beyond. leave the clusters around the bad one unpartitioned. quick format just erases the file indices, it doesn't delete them i.e. it tells the os the files are gone so that you can overwrite them. A full format rebuilds the entire allocation table and marks all the clusters as free. thus a bad sector may be rarely labelled free.
you risk losing data if it is written over this mismarked bad sector.
Some utilities claim to remove bad sectors by resetting the alignment of the clusters.
I would advise against them. Maybe your bad cluster was a false positive, but you may be pushing you luck.
a low level format is done by hard disk manufacturers or in very old hard disks (those 2gb, 4gb dwarves of generations past) and you and I don't need to worry about them.
For more format options, in a dos command window, key in
format /?
eg.
format D: /Q /C /X /FS:NTFS /A:512
quickformats D; to NTFS with 512 byte clusters with compression enabled after forcibly dismounting it.
Smaller the cluster size, IMHO more the fragmentation, lesser the performance, more the compression but lesser the proportion of bad clusters you'll get.
The best way to avoid bas sectors is to keep your hard disk cool, in a static free environment and always shut down/ restart properly.
Defragmentation does not always mean better hard disk life, Frequent defragmentation unnecessarily thrashes the hard disk and makes it heat up and can prove detrimental. Instead organize your files in a proper way and keep them at one place.
Defrag once a month or fortnight to maintain performance
vish786 said:
now in between like in C drive, if a 2 MB bad sector is developed after 1st GB(final sector of 1st GB), the bad sector is at beginning of the 2nd GB, and i know now that at this place i have a 2 MB bad sector, but if i format the C: drive to install the OS again, then the 2 MB bad sector is placed still on hdd but not isolated like u said u isolate and is unpartitioned. but how will the OS know this while installing that it has to unpartition the bad sector ?? like 1st GB is partitioned and the next 2 MB is unpartitioned and the next remaining size is partitioned.
You'll need to reparttition. the first partition should be less than 1 gig before the bad cluster.
The others should be after the bad cluster.
You may need to install your os into the larger partition, which won't be a problem if you are using WinXP or later as they needn't be installed in the c drive.
I hope you get the picture:
*img405.imageshack.us/img405/2416/picnd9.jpg