Can Viruses cause reallocated Sectors (bad sectors)?

Viruses and worms
1

Ok, I found one of my hard drives in my raid 0 array had many reallocated sectors. Meaning, they were detected as bad sectors and remaped to a good sector.

Now, I might of had a virus, I have it saved to a floppy, but it might just be a false alarm (IE: it could just be virus definitions from one of the online scanners I was using). I googled this topic, but all I could find is that bad sectors can be caused by viruses. But, I am not sure if this reallocation of sectors is a hardware issue only or a software issue!

BTW: if I am confusing you, then visit this site:
http://www.ariolic.com/activesmart/smart-attributes/reallocated-sectors-count.html
(This “Reallocated Sector Count” is what is showing up on my hard drive diagnostic utility…)
Also, visit this, and you should understand what I mean:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/formatDefect-c.html

I realize that a virus can mark bad clusters in the FAT or NTFS file tables; but, can a virus cause sectors to be reallocated via the hard drive internal defect map, or is this just caused by hardware malfunction?

2

I never heard that…
I think this is related to hardware malfunction, but it would be good to know for sure from one of the virus specialists of avast…

3

I honestly don’t know if there’s malware that can cause bad sectors (or the appearance of bad sectors) but if a virus was causing this I think you would see bad sectors across all your drivers rather than a single physical disk. So, like Tech, I think its a hardware problem.

Since RAID 0 has no fault tolerance so I would replace the drive as soon as you can.