error: the drive cannot find the sector requested

[sparafucille]

error: the drive cannot find the sector requested

lately I recieved the above error message few times for the same torrent file accompanied with the following tracker status: offline (timeout).

Normally this torrent file has 20 seeds and 50 peers.

what is going on? what am I doing wrong? is there anything I can do to avoid it?

I am running utorrent 1.7.5 on windows xp+sp2 with 3Mb bw.

searched the error message superficially in this forum (general) and in the faq and couldn't find a trace.

please help!

[Invy]

Your hard drive is failing...

[sparafucille]

Invy, Are you sure? it is a quite new 160GB ide

Thanks for the fast reply.

I'll check your answer

[Ultima]

At the very least, you're probably going to have to reformat the drive. At the worst, you might need to get a new drive. Being new doesn't absolutely guarantee the quality, as it isn't that uncommon for faulty hardware to slip by the manufacturers' quality testing.

[Invy]

Go to Start > Run > type in eventvwr.msc and hit enter. Click System log, sort by date, and look for any entries around the time of the errors. You'll likely see a few of them. This will confirm that there is a problem reading information from certain sectors of your hard drive.

As Ultima said, you could try reformatting your system. But really this does nothing other than work around the problem. There is a chance that this may not do any good depending on the file size of the torrent data you are downloading, in proportion to the total size of your drive. It's really just a matter of what type of data is stored on what sectors of your disk, and exactly how much of the sectors have gone faulty.

It's also likely that you may have experience random errors, or undesired effects while doing other things on the computer. But like I said it's just a matter of what type of data is stored on what areas of your hard drive.

You could try to reformat and see if you can work around the problem. But the more you fill the hard drive with data, the more likely you'll be saving to 'bad areas' of the hard drive. This will lead to corrupt or otherwise unusable data which is always a bad thing. And there's also a chance it could take out vital system files and cause your Windows not to boot at all.

Personally, I wouldn't risk it and back up any important data you want to keep, and look into investing on another hard drive asap..you'll have to do it sooner or later. Once a drive is failing, there's no turning back.

[sparafucille]

OK, I give up. I scanned the disk with few programs and found nothing. next I defragged. ans I hope that this will give me some more time.

I'm downloading a 6GB folder with millions of small files and all I lost was two rather small files. Rechecking the torrent will download them again.

My question now is this: how do I mark bad sectors?

I scanned the drive with several programs and I don't know if anything was marked. I know Norton's diskdoctor used to do it but I don't feel like installing Norton for this.

Formatting is out of the question because it will cancel the bad sectors marks.

Thank you all for you fast and reliable answers.