Windows reports "Bad Packets" on HD

I had such great success posting in the malware forums I thought I'd try another one!

I have an older computer running Windows 95 (stop laughing) Pentium II 350mhz, 1gig of ram ... I have two hard drives on this system. I have a 6 gig one that I keep the OS and programs I use installed on. I little while ago the computer kind of went "wonky" and restarted itself, and Windows scandisk kicked in, but it ran in a way I had never seen before. The screen filled with a graphic of little blocks being filled one at a time. When the scan was over I got a message reporting that several bad "packets" had been discovered, and that this was a usual sign that the hard drive would fail soon and I should back up everything and get a new hard drive. Interestingly, it said that the program found in those "packets" was my AVG antivirus program, and ever since that program has been crashing every morning when it tries to update itself.
I had planned to reformat this drive and do a fresh install since it has been several years since I have done so, and so I have kind've ignored this problem for awhile. Even more recently I have been getting error messages telling me there is not enough memory when I try to d'load email or save spreadsheets, although there is still 1 gigabyte of room left on that drive and in the case of the spreadsheets they are saved to the other hard drive I have on the system. Often the error is that there is no room left in the temp file, and something about check if I have permission to write to it. I don't know if these two things are related.
I managed to get a donation of a slightly larger hard drive from another older system, but I haven't done anything with it yet.
So I have a few questions:
Should I really be concerned that this hard drive is kaput, or can I just reformat it and reinstall everything and it will be okay?
What's all this talk about "bad packets" anyway?
Is it even necessary to be reformatting and reinstalling my OS every so often?
Thanks in advance for any information you can give me.

 

Sounds like your hard drive is failing. Backup any important files and replace the drive. You could reformat and use the disk, but I would never trust it. It seems you are using some old computer parts there. Hard drives are mechanical, and do fail at some point.

 

Fred_G is probably right. The "bad sectors" indication is a warning that some areas of your hard drive have become unusable. It's likely that the number of bad sectors will increase.

In your case, it could be that some sectors that went bad were sectors containing AVG files. Once the sector has failed, it's unreadable; Windows would see the file using that sector as corrupted.

Re-formatting the drive allows the drive to discover which sectors have failed and to mark them so that they are not used in future. But the probability is high that more sectors will fail, making the drive completely unreliable.

The other problems you've described make me wonder if you already have a large number of bad sectors. If so, you have nowhere near the free space reported by your operating system.

Some folks seem to think that reformatting a drive and re-installing Windows is just part of life with Windows. That's not my experience. In 18 years, I've never had to reformat a drive with any version of Windows I've used, from Windows 3.0 to XP. But then, I'm pretty conservative about what I install, and I'm fairly careful about regular maintenance of the operating system. Have a look at <http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650> if you want to pursue that idea.

And as Fred_G implied, there are only two kinds of hard drive: those that have failed, and those that will fail. The only difference between the two is time.

And for information than you ever wanted about hard drive sectors, check out the following:
<http://www.infopackets.com/news/hardware/2004/20040917_repair_damaged_sectors_on_a_hard_drive.htm>
<http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_disk_sector_structures.htm>.

 

I've heard of bad sectors before, but what's the difference between "packets" and "sectors"?

 

A packet is a block of actual data, whereas a sector is a sectional area on the hard disk drive. Bath can become corrupt or "bad" Bad data packets or bad physical sectors of the drive itself.

 

I've never seen MS ScanDisk refer to "packets". I've seen only references to bad sectors in that software (at least, in the versions I've used), so I assumed that you were referring to bad sectors reported by ScanDisk, and provided the answer above on that basis.

But as Lev's post implies, it's really only a semantic difference. If a hard drive sector that contains data goes bad, the data written to that sector goes bad. If ScanDisk reports visible bad sectors (or packets), the drive is failing.

 

Thanks everyone, for the confirmation. I will have to give that donor hard drive a try.

Just as a side note: I emptied all my temp folders and that seems to have cured the errors I was getting with saving files. Seems the two problems weren't related?

 

They could have been related. But without the specific error messages, it's hard to draw any firm conclusions.

Your first post referred to "insufficient memory" error messages while there was still an indicated 1GB supposedly remaining on the drive. Normally, an "insufficient memory" message does not refer to hard drive space because they're not the same thing -- but I've forgotten what message you're likely to get if the system tries to page memory contents out to the swapfile on the hard drive and finds it can't do so because the drive is full.

However, the TEMP folder can get amazingly large if it's not cleared from time to time. That situation was worse in Win95 because it crashed more frequently, denying the OS its usual opportunity to clean up its temp files. And of course, crashes can leave corrupted temp files in the folder, and I've seen more than one reminder that corrupted temp files can cause problems when the system goes back to look at those files for whatever reason.

When you get around to moving to Win98, you might want to consider using a product like CCleaner to clear out the temp files and other garbage that systems tend to accumulate over time.