h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Uh oh, someone just told you, 'Your hard drive has crashed' or 'It's getting bad clusters'... but wait, don't get that handkerchief just yet. Most hard drives come guaranteed to last three years. If your hard drive is older than three, please do take out your handkerchief. If your hard drive is less than three years old, this means good things for you. Due to the marvelous rate at which data storage technology is increasing, it is very possible that new hard drives are now only made at capacities that are greater than the size of your now useless hard drive. This means you can send in your old drive and get a brand new one at no cost and with more storage capacity than before, since the company no longer owns any drives of that size to send you. Happpy days.

As one human wrote: "Every cloud has a silver lining".

Another good use for bad sectors is as an excuse why any work which might be done on a computer is not yet done. As in: "I finished it on time, but it got saved in a bad sector and I lost the whole thing."

This is really starting to be a poor excuse, though. My German teacher, who isn't entirely fluent in English, used 'the cat ate my computer' as an example of a typical excuse.