I have a 8 gig hardrive and when I did a through scandisk, it said that I had 700,416 bytes in bad sectors. At the top it said that everything is ok. Does this mean that scandisk fixed the errors?
How do you get bad sectors on your hardrive?

 

Generally bad sectors are a sign the drive is beginning to fail. There are other reasons but the general reason is an HD failure. The most important thing is whether the bad sectors are at the beginning or boot sectors or the middle/end which are not as serious. There is no way to repair this type of failure and when these sectors show up it is time to think about another drive. The current drive could last another year or fail now, just depends on how fast the drive deteriorates. I would start doing a standard scandisk say every three or four days and start watching for the amount of bad sectors to increase. As the number starts getting higher the drive is getting ready to die. Drives are cheap now so go get a new one, set it as master, format and do a clean install of the OS, transfer any data you want to save to the new drive (PARTITION IT!) and maybe use the old drive for menial storage until it fails.