How much is your data worth?
How much time do you want to spend on it?
How much money do you want to spend?
Can you live with the potential failure or worry about it constantly?

It's a purely subjective decision.

-4wd (June 25, 2012, 09:19 PM)

Lets say you have a HDD that starts developing bad clusters and by the time you find out the problem there is N bad clusters:

1. The number N increases rapidly. It won't wait.
2. If a a newly develop bad cluster take place on a spot where one of your Window component files or a driver - you get Blue Screen. Yes there is a chance you can run in safe mode, mark that spot bad, replace the corrupted crucial file and continue using that HDD.
3. Even when a newly bad spot corrupts a non-crucial data file, say cache file, cookies etc. You will soon find more and more program to response slower and slower... simply because quite often, an attempt to read something on a bad spot will take minutes if not hours before the system decides it is bad.

In brief, no matter what, it is not worth the trouble.
As soon as REAL bad cluster is found, trashing the HDD is a matter of affirmative and securing as much as possible data on it is an urgency... remember this:
Restoring backup to a new HDD is always easier and take much shorter time than rebuilding it from scratch.

The longer one make his/her final decision the more data will be lost and the more he/she suffers. I really can't figure out why this matter can become purely subjective?

Make it this way, even if I enjoy torturing myself, I won't choose to secure a HDD with bad sectors. I rather go with SM sex... :)

Windows 7 x64

So I just reinstalled Windows a couple of weeks ago.  One of my huge (3TB) external drives (connected esata) had some issues where I think the index got corrupted.  All the files are still there and I can move/copy them and do whatever I need to do.  But for some files, like a video file, I'll open it in the video player, but another file (an audio file) will start playing instead.  So instead of expecting to watch a astronomy documentary, I'll be listening to Wynonna Judd.  But the file is the video file in all the properties and everything, I don't get it.

So I figured I had a corrupt index.  I did a chkdsk twice, it found some stuff (not too sure what exactly), but the problem still remains.  Any clue how to deal with this?  Should I be worried and get rid of the drive?

-superboyac (June 20, 2012, 07:05 PM)

Why don't you try copy the video file (the problem maker) to another location with a different name and try play the latter then tells us what happen?

I would like to add this:
Bad sector only prevent you from reading or writing a file, it won't play you a song... :)

Hi superboyac,

My experience in all those video editors and converters tells me, normally it is the "support of output formats" that actually impose limitation on them, not the inputs format. Let's say your system is able to play video format "A" (that means the required codec is already installed) and even if it is not listed among the supported input formats you can still attempt to load a format "A" video, just select "All files" type in the open file dialog, chances is the video file will be loaded and you can go on edit or convert it. i.e. forget about the file extension, a good video editing program shouldn't rely on that to determine actual video format.

The above is at least true for TMpegEnc and AVS programs that i have used before.