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SG Enterprise encryption - Bad Sectors survey

jb1111

Has anyone here encountered bad sectors on encrypted machines?  I had 2 computers run for 3-4 months, get bad sectors and start crashing or going to a Windows screen with no icons <-you can only power off at this point.  Attempting to fix the bad sectors does not help.  The only thing I've gotten to work is backup the files (assuming I can even get into the system) and destroy the hard disk with Dban or killdisk.  These low level format and, "Zero out" the drive.  Once this 6 hour process is done, I reload Windows.  Chkdsk no longer shows bad sectors and life is good.

Has anyone come up with another approach to bad sectors or other hard drive issues?  I am most concerned this will be a monthly occurance.  Perhaps I could get a utility to report when drives start getting bad sectors?

Thanks.

PS - my SG policy is set to, "Proceed on bad sectors = yes"

:4085


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    I had a very similar problem on a laptop. I get a block of about 96MB's of bad sectors appear for no real reason on a brand new machine (less than a month old). I reset back to day one and bad sectors were no longer present. I then proceeded to encrypt again but within a few days, the same 96MB's were back.
     
    Obviously when restoring the original image, the bad sector definitions were wiped out and it actually turned out to be a duff disk rather than anything SGN had introduced. Disk zeroing is likely to have done exactly the same thing to you, wiping out the bad sector tables then leaving the disk in a state where it has to re-discover them again. What I'd be inclined to do is a fresh wipe, and then run a chkdisk /r on an unencrypted disk which will do a much more intensive surface scan across all sectors rediscovering any bad sectors. If there are truly any bad ones there, they'll show up again and you should be able to determine if this is an SGN issue or simple hardware failure.

    Matt

    :4088
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  • 0

    I had a very similar problem on a laptop. I get a block of about 96MB's of bad sectors appear for no real reason on a brand new machine (less than a month old). I reset back to day one and bad sectors were no longer present. I then proceeded to encrypt again but within a few days, the same 96MB's were back.
     
    Obviously when restoring the original image, the bad sector definitions were wiped out and it actually turned out to be a duff disk rather than anything SGN had introduced. Disk zeroing is likely to have done exactly the same thing to you, wiping out the bad sector tables then leaving the disk in a state where it has to re-discover them again. What I'd be inclined to do is a fresh wipe, and then run a chkdisk /r on an unencrypted disk which will do a much more intensive surface scan across all sectors rediscovering any bad sectors. If there are truly any bad ones there, they'll show up again and you should be able to determine if this is an SGN issue or simple hardware failure.

    Matt

    :4088
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