Please help! HDD gone bad. Real bad.

[Jonah]

So in January i built myself a new pc to replace my windows XP netbook. It was running fine until yesterday, May 13, when i got a message from windows asking me to print instructions for backing up my "failing" Hard drive. I downloaded HDTune and found out i had 530 Bad sectors. I don't have a clue what this means, and when i Googled it i found that most people had 3-10 bad sectors. I set up windows backup to backup onto a supposedly 80gb external HDD. Software and hardware again not agreeing what a gigabyte is, it turned out it was only 55gb, the same as the used space on my PC. I tried to backup anyway but it was taking hours so i cancelled and shutdown.
Today i tried to boot up to find my BIOS saying that my HDD is failed and it will not boot anymore. I booted up a spare copy of Linux Mint i had lying around on a DVD and started copying my files onto my tiny 4gb USB drive. I thenn took the drive out, put it in an external enclosure and plugged into my netbook. I now cannot open the disk in explorer and it refers to the drive as "local disk" not J-PC like the drive is called and linux called it. It seems the drive is in 2 partitions, and the tiny "system reserved" one opens fine, but only has some microsoft stuff in. I'm now running my tiny netbook again, and it feels so slow and bad.

The HDD is a cheap WD Scorpio black i bought from amazon along with the rest of my build.

So my questions are:
1-What is a bad (reallocated) sector?
2-Is this affected by software and what i was doing on my PC yesterday?
3-If I buy a 128gb SSD, will i be able to clone my disk onto it or is it already too corrupted?
4-How would i clone it?
5-If it is corrupted, will i be able to install to the new disk from an OEM copy of windows or will i have to buy a user copy.

Thanks in advance, Jonah.

PC details
Asus M5A97 LE R2.0 Board
Cooler master elite 500w PSU
AMD FX6100 6-Core CPU
WD Scorpio Black 2.5" 160GB HDD
ATI Radeon 5450 GPU
Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz 4gb single stick RAM

Also, I'm new to this place and if this thread is in the wrong place, sorry :l

Update:
I booted linux from the DVD and could acces my files again. However i still can't install linux to anything to be able to clone the disk.

 

[johnb35]

Do not clone a damaged disk. Your best bet would be to buy a new hard drive, then reinstall windows and then copy over any data you need. And why did you buy a laptop hard drive instead of a desktop hard drive?

Bad sectors arise for many reasons.

1. drive just failing
2. abrupt power outages
3. shutting the system down by pressing and holding the power button instead of the shutdown command.
4. many others.

 

[Jonah]

Your best bet would be to buy a new hard drive, then reinstall windows and then copy over any data you need.

But would i be able to reinstall from my OEM copy? I somehow doubt it.

Why get a laptop drive?

Simply because i was in a rush at the time of buying and the desktop model i wanted was unavailable and this was in the related items. I failed to notice that it was a 2.5" until it arrived in a bag full of styrofoam.

I can now ignore my BIOS and boot into windows and no files seem to be corrupted, but when it tried to check the disk it did stop at about halfway.

 

[johnb35]

But would i be able to reinstall from my OEM copy? I somehow doubt it.

Why couldn't you? You have the operating system install cd correct? OEM means its tied to the motherboard, not the hard drive that it was installed on.

 

[Jonah]

Great, Thanks for the help
The only problem i see is that there is so many files i would want to keep and I'd need to reinstall all my drivers and motherboard software, but apart from that, seems fine.

Just a quick question:
If i were to get an SSD and whatever caused the other drive to fail, if it wasn't just the disk failing, happened again, would it make a difference? Do SSDs even have sectors or do they use a completely different technology?
Thanks again,
Jonah

 

[johnb35]

SSD's are basically flash memory. No moving parts so they are quite different. You will need to backup any data you need to a different drive before reinstalling windows.