Hard Drive w/Bad Sectors

**partloer** · May 10th, 2013

Is it likely to get bad sectors because of loss of power on a desktop computer?

**Mark Phelps** · May 10th, 2013

Most likely -- no.

What CAN happen is that the filesystem gets corrupted due to incomplete writes and/or directory updates.

If you want help, it would do better if you would describe the problem and its symptoms for us.

**tgalati4** · May 10th, 2013

Loose cables could cause problems, but more likely is old age. How old is the disk drive?

**partloer** · May 11th, 2013

This was on my Dad's desktop computer standard 1TB Seagate SATA. The computer is less than three years old so it came as a surprise to me that it failed so soon. I had daily backups to another computer so all the data was fine. But I was trying to find out that cause of the problem in order to better prevent this from happening again. I know that hard drives do fail from time to time (that is why I had a backup) but I have really only had problems with portable systems (laptop, portable hard drives, etc). The problem became obvious when he could no longer log into windows 7 it would just freeze before the log in screen. I attempted some of the repair method tools that come with windows 7 however none of them worked (I could not get chkdsk to run). I later ran disk utility from the ubuntu live disk which showed the drive had bad sectors.

**Mark Phelps** · May 11th, 2013

That is surprising that a Seagate drive failed that soon. I used to swear by WD drives, but then, I had three fail me in a single year, and one was only a few months old.

So, drives can and do fail after a short period of use.

But simple power failures are unlikely to cause a drive to fail by themselves.

**partloer** · May 12th, 2013

Thanks Mark. That is kinda my thought just an anomaly but wasn't sure if there is more to it.

**tgalati4** · May 12th, 2013

If the computer was on 24/7 for 3 years, then I would suggest it is toast as consumer drives have the reliability just above that of a Christmas toy. I would install smartmontools during a Live session and look at the SMART parameters. There may be something else going on with the drive.