Bad Sectors

Smackhead · 26 May 2008 at 17:42

Could bad sectors on your HDD cause random restarts of the whole PC?

My current drive is a 150GB Raptor. Since I ran chkdsk c: /r and the WD Diagonistics, it seems to be running fine but its early days yet so could it of been caused by Bad Sectors?

HighlandeR · 26 May 2008 at 22:41

Of course it can, any hardware faults will cause freezing/crashing and random reboots.

Usualy its the Ram or hdd causing those type of problems.

Lanz · 27 May 2008 at 14:16

Bad sectors mainly cause retries and pausing, unless there's a bad sector on an important system file, i dont think it would cause reboots. So i doubt its your harddisk tbh.

RichieM · 29 May 2008 at 09:53

Lanz said:
Bad sectors mainly cause retries and pausing, unless there's a bad sector on an important system file, i dont think it would cause reboots. So i doubt its your harddisk tbh.

I disagree, it depends if you have BSOD turned off, then the PC will automatically reboot instead of BSOD'ing.

I've had random reboots in the past due to bad sectors, some in the boot sector, some in the MFT.

ElectroBlaster · 31 May 2008 at 21:41

My 160gb seagate is dying and over time has been either wrecking the operating system or corrupting mpeg2 files. Ive had a few bsod's aswell.