heavy fragmentation is not actually a sign na may bad sector na yung hard drive.

think of the hard drive platters as a pizza. cut the pizza into wedges, then idivide mo pa each wedge into smaller pieces, and so on - that's a representation of the sectors in your hard drive. as data gets written on the hard drive, it goes to the first available free sector, and so on. now, if you delete some data taking up a couple of sectors, once new data is written, some of it may be put into the newly-freed sectors, or the other sectors na always free before. repeat the process, and that's how fragmentation happens.

now how is this bad?

if you're familiar with those choose-your-own-adventure books (addict ako nun nung gradeschool, yun lang dahilan ko to go to the library, hehehe), diba you keep skipping pages instead of front cover to back cover yung babasahin mo (usual books)? ganun if fragmented, matatagalan magbasa yung system from the drive kasi kesa less than one sweep to get all the data for a sequential or lightly fragmented hard drive, it has to do at least one full sweep of all the sectors, adding to the access time.

when you're running defrag, the best way to do it is in safe mode and with the screensaver and any other startup applications off as they interfere with the data-in-the-sector rearrganging process, forcing defrag to go back to square one.

anyway, nobela na nasulat ko. hyper nako with a lot of brazo de mercedes ice cream. hehehehehehe!!!