The firmware on the hard drive constantly monitors the state of each sector and if it comes across a bad sector it will automatically remap the sector to one of sectors in the pool. There is a small pool of sectors that is held in reserve. In modern disk drives, you do not have access to all of the sectors.

When I was having problems with Seagate drives (all 3 of them failed and had to be replaced) I was reading some of the documentation that Seagate provided (if I can ever find it again I will provide a link or a quote). I apologize for not being technically accurate. … It marks a bad sector as unusable and allocates a different, usable sector.Ĭafed00d: Which is, of course, what I meant. A sector is a physical location on the hard drive. I mean, I assume there will be an issue between the HP stuff on the drive and the Acer machine regarding drivers and all that so.Cafed00d: However, if either tool comes across a bad sector, the hardware in the hard drive will automatically move the bad sector to a new location.ībearran: Not quite. Obviously the primary partition is where it needs to be installed but I am wondering.

When attempting to install the operating system and it asks me where I want to install it I am shown the 4 partitions with the HP recovery, HP tools, system and Primary. I am putting a hard drive from a HP Compaq into an Acer machine (both drives had the same OS on them). Obviously it still has all the info on the drive from the old laptop so I am wondering I pulled a smaller drive out of a laptop I had laying around that has a bad motherboard and replaced the bad drive with it.

Tried using a win7 disc I had to repair and or reinstall the OS but it hangs up. tried accessing the acer e recovery on the hidden partition but it hangs up. it appears I cannot do anything with that drive.

Seagate tools