on the other hand, it just jumped very quickly through 30,000 segments - a quarter of the partition. it went from 50% to 75% in a flash. so, it may still balance out. and 5% of the partition is still less than 1% of the drive....

(i'm also making the error of attaching file segments to physical segments, which i know is an error, but can't really be applied like that)

which is to say i'm talking about the percentage of the mft, rather than the percentage of the disc. i'll probably keep doing that. intuition. but knowing that 5-10% of the file records are unreadable doesn't *actually* tell me how much of the disc is "bad". and knowing this is a drive with a windows os, office and other programs with lots of little files means it really honestly might not be as bad as it looks. i mean, it could be 5000 corrupt 10K files. no, it could. an optimistic projection, but it could.

...and that's why we run the utilities.