Long boot now - Always bad clusters

It seems like two or three times a week my boot is now much longer than usual due to there being bad clusters being found. Sometimes I click out and pass the check that seems to come up so often. When I do let it go through its thing, it seems to always find bad clusters in three or four files each time.

I image my drive and backup data all the time so I'm not worried about that - it's just that I am tired of it always having to run at boot and seemingly always finding and fixing these bad clusters.

Any ideas on what is causing this? Is it time for a new drive?

 

Are you able to tell whether it's the same files every time?

-If it's dropping sectors continually (new corruption each time), then I would say it's probably time for a new drive (after trying a clean install, without disk images, to rule out probs w/ the file system itself)

-If it's just one recurring problem, however, I would look more to the software side of the equation. Get a clean copy of the files, etc. The easiest way to do this would probably be to try and find out what those files are, and belong to, uninstall the app, maybe try running something like Eraser to overwrite the old data, defrag, and reinstall the app. (I don't know how useful running Eraser really is, but 'back when' we were always told not to overwrite data as it would increase the likelyhood of corruption. So it's purely anecdotal, but I tend to run Eraser once every few months to 'clean up' the drive. I have noticed, for instance, that doing a 'quick format' when reinstalling Windows can lead to more problems than a full format.)

 

Most manufacturers have diagnostics tools for harddisks which you can download at their sites. Maybe you should try that. From my experience the number of bad clusters is growing and growing when it has started.
Regards,

Gerard

 

If you want a general tool that will offer prediction of most any drives remaining life try HDD Health (free)
You may need to close it while burning CD/DVD's.
I've been using it for a while and it seems quite good. Much better in fact than some of the earlier versions. Screenshot of mine attached. TEC is the earliest predicted date of failure and the longer it runs the more accurate it is.

 

Thank you for all the helpful replies!

I will try several of the suggestions and report back.

Thanks again!

GLS

 

Another good one here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=64297