bad sectors ?

Generally, yes. Actual hard drive failure is hard to predict. Perhaps someone can shed some more light.

You can try to format it, if it can't work around the bad sectors, it will not format at all.

I have a hard drive with bad sectors. It doesn't boot, because some of the windows installation files were lost- but I'd imagine if I formatted it, it might work. The bad sectors would not be repaired, but they would be skipped over and left unused.

I know that quick formatting won't correct for sure and afaik ordinary formatting "just tries to make certain that bad sectors are bad" :smile:

I fixed one a month ago that, well, basically the entire hard disk was nothing but bad sectors. After much turmoil, I finally got it formatted and installed windows, but still showed many bad sectors. Then I ran chkdsk /r, and viola - no bad sectors.