bad sectors and clusters,

speaking from the silicon, that is from the beginning of hard disk manufacture, bad clusters is nothing but the unusable space of your hard drive.. suppose if you are having 500 GB of hard disk , u can get around a total of 480 GB of hard disk space after installation...Remaining 20 GB is the bad cluster , that is you will not get that 20 GB and u cannot use it.. I cannot go in detail with the manufacture from silicon, but that bad cluster has got nothing to do with the performance of the computer.. Performance is totally maintained by the Primary Memory that is the RAM...

From my past experience of those bad sectors, I believe such problem was due to the inconsistent of power supply. If the bad sector can not be recovered, there might be a physical damage to the hard disk. A repair can be done by scanning and defragment. I hope it will resolve your problem.

you must shut down your computer properly... also, do periodic maintenance utility check ups... next, if its a laptop don't use your computer in shaky places that might give the hard disk a scratch. Well, having bad sectors is more like eating your hard disk memory slowly... it will increase as time goes by. Might as well buy a new hard drive before it gets worse

To bad, bad sector can spread more if you use your hard drive. But, to prevent it, use partition software and make a little partition for cluster to cluster which is bad. then don't try format it, and leave it that way. it will not bother you anymore nor it cannot spread and damage your whole hard drive. hope it help.

Do hard drive defragmentation on a weekly basis. Also monitor your hard drive status by a hard drive monitoring status.

each partiton of hard disk is divided into some subdivision which is called cluster. A cluster is the smallest possible unit of storage on a hard disk.and this size of cluster depend on the size of partition and type of files system loaded in it.so a small partition uses small cluster size and large partition uses larger cluster.and also you cannot use some of the cluster portions.there is a very tedious calculation of cluster area.i dont know that.cluster has no contribution with hard disk speed.. and talking about bad sector it really doesnt mean any physical damage to your disk but it means that when your software is reading data it cannotsoftware is reading data it cannot read the data from that particular portion of your disk.also if the disk fails to write the data checksum data.. to remove the bad sector which really occurs because of playing very high graphics games and continuous power on for a pc.. to remove bad sctor use you can use WIPEDRIVE software which writes zero to the entire hard disk or use he standard windows format command with the /c or /t parameter. To check your drive for bad sectors, and mark them as such:Run ScanDisk on the drive in Windows 95 / 98, or run a chkdsk on the drive in Windows XP.

Bad sectors are clear by software such as scandisk. As the program is testing the data irregularly it hits an area on the disk that cannot normally be read - therefore it is marked as 'bad'. Usually these things cannot be removed as they are actual physical imperfections on the disk. Be alert that if this show up during scans, your disk may be approaching the end of its life, backup and check often. Yet, scandisk and some other programs are not just right and they rarely will mark sectors as bad even though they are not. You can check for this using some programs (don't know which one). Scandisk marks bad sectors so that the Operating system no longer uses the clusters and it safeguards that no data gets misplaced.