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BEWARE: Your drive is failing!
Authored by: a1291762 on Thu, Feb 7 2008 at 3:27PM PST
Your symptoms indicate the internal drive is failing. Be very wary of trusting it!

Hard disks come with a certain amount of spare space. When a physical defect is detected, the location is marked as bad and some of the spare space is used instead (so that the size of the disk does not mysteriously decrease).

The hard disk will not do this remapping when you try to read a bad location, only when you try to write to the bad location. Thus you cannot backup your data but you can format and re-install.

The problem is that a drive will start failing but with a re-install you'll think it's actually ok. Most of the time though the failures will accelerate and you'll quickly find yourself losing data if you're trusting that disk. When will this happen? Once the spare space has been used up you'll get unrecoverable problems. Do yourself a favor and buy a new disk before that happens.

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