text: are there ways to tell if/when your hard drive is gonna go?   bad sectors will appear if a drive is constantly rewriting the same place over and over again, such as on a badly fragmented partition.  bad sectors appearing more often than every four months is a sign to start backing up data.    when in doubt, buy a new drive.  if you can live with a small size (20gb or less) you can find unused ones on the cheap to put into old pcs.  if you buy two and use them as a slave for data and master for programs, it's easy to replace in the future.  if you buy a new and larger drive, partition it with programs on one partition and data on another (say, 30/30 on a 60gb drive).  it will make tracking sector errors easier down the road.