Will a 98SE restore still show bad clusters?

[xpnewbie58]

MY QUESTION IN A NUTSHELL: If Scandisk shows MANY bad clusters, is that strong evidence of a hard drive that's no good anymore? Or could it be related to a software problem that might be fixed by doing a restore of everything on the hard drive? Other possibilities? Read paragraphs below for more background.

My niece has an older computer that used to work well. I know it has more than one trojan because I ran a virus scan. It's crashing all the time and she really can't use it until it's fixed. I am trying to fix it. I was just going to wipe it and reinstall everything, since she has the original Windows 98SE cd's. But the initial problem is that when it's booting up, it always runs Scandisk first (because since she started having problems with the computer, it seldom powers down without doing an improper shutdown). There are around 32,000 clusters on the hard disk. Scandisk makes its way up to about 10,000 without a problem. After that there's bad cluster after bad cluster--MANY bad clusters.

I'm not sure if this is a Windows 98 SE problem or a hard drive problem, and I prefer to post to this forum instead of the hardware forum. But I don't want to hassle with wiping the hard drive and then doing a restore if the hard drive is shot anyway.

[Murf]

Unrelated,

Bad Clusters means there are area's of the hard drive that will not accept data. What scandisk does is identify and set them asside so they are not used. Or fixes them sometimes if they are repairable. (rare)

This is a sign of the hard drive going bad and over time the clusters will migrate and get worse. It could last several years without getting any more bad clusters.

I would replace the drive and keep the old one just to use for storage/backup.