Ok, so I'm not sure how the HDD on my laptop got messed up...but I DO have some rare earth magnets around here, and although I heard I would have to purposely try to mess up the HDD with these magnets to do some real damage, the fact is that the HDD has many bad sectors....SOOOO...I don't care that what minimal data was on it is corrupted, but can I recover the drive itself with a reformat, or do magnets (if that's what damaged it) permantently damage an HDD beyond repair? Thanks, Jeff
more than likely the magnets had nothing to do with the bad sectors. sometimes, bad sectors is caused by corrupted software but not always til you do a format. download the diagnostic program from the hd manufacturer to see if bad sectors are real or not.
