[RESOLVED] Boot sector = bad sector

My hard drive is a 3-gig (you may start laughing now) EIDE drive, and is about 2 years old. I haven't encountered a severe problem until today.

I have a P166, Windows 95, 32mb of ram, S3 Virge video card, and a 3 gig hard drive. If you need the model number, I'll pry the computer apart and give it to you.

I had just finished playing a game of Quake (you may laugh again) and dropped back to the desktop. I press the Start button and open ICQ, but while it loads, this pop-up screen comes on saying that it "can't write the user.dat file", and that I need to make more room for it.

"Okay," I thought, "I'll just have it re-attempt a write. Hmm, doesn't work... maybe I'll just cancel the user.dat write... that doesn't work either. Well, since it looks like I'll end up reformatting this drive (again), I'll just reboot Windows and see what my options are."

So after I reboot, Scandisk attempts a scan. It said that there's a bad sector on the disk and would attempt a fix. Unfortunately, this didn't work at all... it quickly reported that it wasn't able to do so.

So now I'm thinking, "Oh god. Now not only do I have to back up again, I'll have to get a new drive, too!" Windows loads in Safe mode, but brings this screen up about how a bad sector's affecting the registry, and it will try to restore the broken Registry. Of course, this doesn't work... so now I'm in the process of backing everything up for the apocalypse I assume is coming.

My question to you, dear readers, is what are my options? Is there software online that will at least have more luck with this bad sector than Scandisk had? Will I have to reformat the hard drive to fix the bad sector (if that is possible)? Is the cheapest fix a new hard drive?

Also, I would like to know some thoughts about the cause of this problem, so I can prevent it in the future. I think my enabling of DMA mode on the drive may have something to do with it, but I am not a hard drive aficionado and would love any opinions on this.

Thanks for ANYONE who replies to this. Your help is greatly appreciated.

yes there is software that will mark bad sectors so data dosn't load to that area of the HDD. however, bad sectors is usually a sign of some type of physical damage to the drive(platters) and that usually gets worse over time and not better...

so where is all this going...drives are as cheap as they've ever been..do yourself a favor and save the headaches when more bad sectors start to show up..

hope this helps...

NDD for dos will do a good job, but if the drive is dying it is dying. If it is a name brand drive it should have a 3 year replacement warranty. Go out and get an 8.4 for a little bit of money, rma the 3 gig back and in about a month you will have 11 gigs of harddrive.