Hi all! I have an older que usb external hd, 40 gig, that i use to hold TrueImage backups. I was trying to copy an image file for archiving to another external hd and got a CRC redundency check. So I checked the event log and saw a bunch of these:

The device, \Device\Harddisk4\D, has a bad block

Does anyone know what that really means? Generic read error or sign of bad things to come?

I love that old thing, its been working great for 4 years or so. I have no problems creating, restoring, and exploring backups from the drive, so I wonder what the problem really is!?!

Thanks for your help,
jigs

If it’s a SMART drive you can use a utility to read the registers and get more information. Or you can either format or CHKDSK, which should mark the block unuseable. If the problem continues and you get new bad blocks, then the disk is dead. Otherwise, you just got a bad spot on the disk.

deichenlaub, thanks for the reply, but can u tell if you have a SMART disk by it’s wearing of geeky glasses and bad fashion?  Is it like a SMART car where u can change the color of the steering wheel?  What about like a SMART mobile, where if it can’t network connect it automatically switches to Donkey Kong mode?

I tried checkdisk and reformat but it did not find bad blocks or indicate a repair. Norton Disk Doctor is worthless, it says there are open files so use the MS check Disk (an example of DUMB utility).

I guess I should be looking for a low-level format util for a Que drive eh?  thanks!!!

It seams SMART disks are a great idea that nobody knows about. When disk drive electronics started using microcontrollers, it became possible for disks to monitor their own performance. The disk drive industry got together and came up with a series of measurements, along with a standard way of retrieving the results, and gave it a clever name. It is possible for a Windows program to monitor the disk drive and warn you before it fails.

Norton Utilities had such a scheme. It could even intentionally mark specific sectors bad. But NU pretty much died when Symantec took it over because they didn’t keep up the tools.

You can see the contents of your SMART disk drive registers with Everest.

This utility also shows a bunch of other cool information about your computer that you can mostly live without. You can see some more information about SMART here:
 

If you’re using a computer, the internal disk drive is most likely a SMART drive. I imagine external drives are also SMART drives, but I don’t know whether the utility can get to the registers.

I guess the reason SMART never became popular because disks got more reliable and because it comes down to buying a new hard drive, as ichirorabbitt already suggested.

You can try FDISK / format. Or if the error occurs when reading a specific file, you can try renaming the file to something like “bad.spot”, then marking it invisible, read-only, system, immovable, immutable, ... Then you will have a smaller disk, but Windows won’t use the bad spot.

thanks for the info on smart drives, from that i downloaded a western digital diag util that checks and repairs bad blocks…running now, it’s slow. but if it works i will be greatful. the error never occurred again and it only happened when i tried to copy 4 very large files to another drive, the files where all over 7 gigs. so perhaps the problem is somewhere in the middle of the drive and i only saw it cause the drive was filled. i hate to see this one go (Que drive) cause it’s been with me for so long (and i am pretty poor after buying this lovely samsung lcd monitor. i’ll let ya know what happens…so i guess disk dr. is really worthless…i really despise symantec but what to do, you cant live without them and ya cant shoot them.  anyway, if the test passes with no bad blocks i will not be surprised. i dont trust ms error messages in xp, they are so often off base its not funny anymore…