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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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    Oh...

    _of_course_ we are talking clusters here, and not sectors - why didn't it hit me earlier?! [slapping my forehead] - Thank you for pointing that out, Thomas.

    I would still maintain that using bad clusters to reserve a disk space is a hack, and not a particularly pretty one (MawfTech's assertion that it reduces the value of bad clusters as an early warning sign is valid, imho), but it sure looks like it became a kind of, er... industry standard hack? What do you know. Maybe it's just the naming and the fact that NTFS does not have an official standard - I guess if Microsoft called this feature "cluster exclusion" (clusterotomy, anyone? :smileytongue:) or "cluster blacklisting", instead of "bad cluster remapping", some of us would feel differently.

    I am totally sure you guys do know what you are doing, and that this method is the lesser evil for some reason. At the same time, I am grateful this issue has been brought up so that now we all know there is a hack involved (industry standard, no less! :smileywink:) and what implications it has for system administration - quite manageable ones, I think, once you have this information. Maybe an explanation of what happens to your disk when you install SG should be included in the basic documentation, just to avoid confusion?

    Petr

    :4467
Reply
  • 0

    Oh...

    _of_course_ we are talking clusters here, and not sectors - why didn't it hit me earlier?! [slapping my forehead] - Thank you for pointing that out, Thomas.

    I would still maintain that using bad clusters to reserve a disk space is a hack, and not a particularly pretty one (MawfTech's assertion that it reduces the value of bad clusters as an early warning sign is valid, imho), but it sure looks like it became a kind of, er... industry standard hack? What do you know. Maybe it's just the naming and the fact that NTFS does not have an official standard - I guess if Microsoft called this feature "cluster exclusion" (clusterotomy, anyone? :smileytongue:) or "cluster blacklisting", instead of "bad cluster remapping", some of us would feel differently.

    I am totally sure you guys do know what you are doing, and that this method is the lesser evil for some reason. At the same time, I am grateful this issue has been brought up so that now we all know there is a hack involved (industry standard, no less! :smileywink:) and what implications it has for system administration - quite manageable ones, I think, once you have this information. Maybe an explanation of what happens to your disk when you install SG should be included in the basic documentation, just to avoid confusion?

    Petr

    :4467
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