BAD SECTORS (Hard Drive)?

My computer first blue screened a couple weeks ago.

It blue screened the other day. All memory was fine both times.

But I fear it will do it again. I updated the BIOS and the computer was working fine since yesterday.

I brought it to the school computer repair center and they ran some sort of hard drive scan. It almost passed, but at the last second, it displayed an error message saying "BAD SECTORS".

The guy told me I could lose data but he's not really sure how much. I could repair it using the tool. My understanding is that the computer renders those parts of the hard drive useless so no data is stored (But your hard drive space is reduced)

I'm afraid of losing alot of data (I have my school files backed up… But I don't want to lose my programs).

I have a 1TB seagate external hard drive and can backup all files it seems (~50GB). But it will take days and I'm not sure if when i reload it to my computer the program files will be whole or in pieces. (It uses Instant Backup) I only selected to backup certain files since backing up the whole thing.

I have some time here. I can't repair the bad sectors and hope it runs fine. I need to do work for school using software. I can also wait a couple days and backup All files to my external hard drive.

Or i can do the repair now and hope it doesn't delete data.

What are your recommendations?
Update: By the way.

Lenovo T430
Intel core i5 vpro processor
Windows 7 64 bit

Guest

I've been very successful in repairing bad sectors with a software called HDD regenerator.
it takes a bit of time to run. It runs fast thru the areas where there are no problems but if you have an area where there are a lot of repairs to do. It slows way down. On a very very bad drive, it ran for 2 days.

you can find it on older versions of hiren's bootcd here
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/hbcd-v104/

there's no data loss for this this process. It will not destroy anything.

i have no particular suggestions on how/when you do it. But when you are done. I'd boot in windows… Open a cmd prompt and do a chkdsk (chkdsk /f) . It'll say it can't check it now but do you want to check it upon reboot… Say yes and restart.

Rich

Usually when you begin to see bad sectors it's time to replace your drive.
You're rather lucky that you're finding bad sectors as a warning that your drive may be going out and not an all at once crash that renders your drive useless.
You should create a system image of your hard drive and have it saved to your external drive which doesn't take very long.
Go into control panel and click on backup & restore and click create system image.
This creates a picture of your entire partition(s) and it copies every folder, every file and when you go to restore it its just as it was when you created the system image

sirjester099