| Electronics > Repair |
| HDD bad sector repair software? |
| << < (3/5) > >> |
| DavidAlfa:
Some years back I used HDD regenerator to recover a drive. After that it formatted and wrote/read data correctly... Then some weeks later I tried to read it again and nope!! Bad sectors are unreliable, don't use them! What I've done many times is to map the bad sectors, then make the partitions skipping the bad area plus a margin of 1gig, some drives worked for years without issues, but never rely on that drive for anything important! |
| Jeroen3:
One thing to know is that the operating system has no control over bad sectors. The disk firmware will deal with it. When trying to read these sectors it will be terribly slow because the disk will try and try and try. Some special kit, such as PC3000 may be able to skip these, this is both specialized hardware and software. An S.M.A.R.T long disk test also does as surface scan and should correct for them. As in, reallocate to one of the hundreds of spares. HDSentinel has a Reinitialize disk surface feature. --- Quote ---Overwrites the disk surface with special initialization pattern to restore the sectors to default (empty) status and reads back sector contents, to verify if they are accessible and consistent. --- End quote --- Anyway if you have more than dozens, the disk is probable EOL. |
| magic:
SMART self test doesn't reallocate anything. In fact, it stops immediately on first error. And (at least on modern Seagate disks) it starts with testing known bad sectors and usually stops there. The rules are simple. If you try to read a bad sector, the disk will retry many times (anywhere from a fraction of a second to many seconds, maybe minutes), then return an error if it still can't get good data from it. If a bad sector is luckily recovered on read, or if its contents are replaced by a write, the disk will try to write the sector and read it back. If that works out OK, it will consider it repaired. If it doesn't, the sector will be reallocated to spare area. If you don't care about the data currently there, you can simply continue using the disk as if nothing happened. If you continue having problems with reading back newly written data, you know the disk is not reliable. But you already have problems, so you know it anyway. That being said, such disk may still be useful if you have other copies of the data. You can test a disk by writing it from start to end and reading back. This should also reset the "Current Pending Sector" count to zero, and it may or may not increase "Reallocated Sector Count". --- Quote from: DavidAlfa on October 01, 2024, 02:31:42 pm ---What I've done many times is to map the bad sectors, then make the partitions skipping the bad area plus a margin of 1gig, some drives worked for years without issues, but never rely on that drive for anything important! --- End quote --- This makes sense for localized damage, and I have done it once for a friend. Last time I heard, the disk was still in service after several years. But it won't help if you have random errors in random places due to some mechanical or electronic problem. Particularly, if a disk keeps creating bad sectors and then repairing them by simple overwriting without reallocation, and then creating new bad sectors elsewhere, you just know not to expect much from it. |
| Whales:
I'll reiterate what some others here have said. Once upon a time "bad sectors" were a normal part of harddrives. Your OS had to notice them, mark them as bad and work around them. This was called "low level formatting" in some places (although this term is sometimes used to mean something else again). Then some time (in the 1990's?) this all changed. It became the drive's responsibility to detect and deal with bad sectors. The firmware on the harddrive would swap them for spares, so the OS would only ever see a perfect disk with no bad sectors. To allow this the disk would be a few % bigger than what you see in your OS ("over-provisioning"). You no longer "low level format" or "initialise" disks, just partition them and "quick" format a filesystem instead. This means that if a modern drive is reporting bad sectors: something VERY bad is happening. So bad that it has run out of space sectors, which almost always means you have an accelerating problem of many more bad sectors than you can see. A drive will only report errors to the OS if it has run out of options. |
| wraper:
Victoria or MHDD (run from DOS). |
| Navigation |
| Message Index |
| Next page |
| Previous page |