Fixing bad sectors on hard drives

iceblue24

Ive got a couple of laptop hard drives that are covered with bad sectors. I'd like to fix them up somehow so i can use one as a backup drive and use the other for a dual boot setup with ubuntu and xp.

can anyone recommend a good free bit of software to fix bad sectors on hard drives?

HappyMJ

Honestly it's not worth it especially as a form of backup.

S0litaire

"Bad sectors" are areas if the disk which have stopped holding data properly. You can't "fix" them, the best you can do is do a full back up of the drive before it gets any worse.

You can then do a full format of the drive, that will look for all the bad areas of the disk and mark them as "BAD" and make sure they are not used.

But if a disk is getting a lot of bad sectors then it's on the way out and best not to use them for backups!!

iceblue24

i did a full format on one of the drives then tried to wack a partition in, but it failed. something to do with bad sectors. looks like its new hard drive time. cheers fellas

fwor

It depends on the make, but generally a format will not force the marking of bad sectors. IIRC, with Seagate/Maxtor drives you have to use the "zero entire drive" option in their diagnostic tools - this causes it to write to and verify every part of the drive, and it's that that allows it to identify bad sectors. Normally it takes a very long time on drives of any size.

As said above, there's a good chance that one or both are on their way out, but it's also possible that they have taken a knock while running and the damage is limited in extent. I believe that all modern HDDs have a very large number of "spare" sectors that can be swapped in to replace damage.

Again, as above, I'd happily use the drive for data I didn't care about, but would never entrust it with important data again...

tonynw

try

active kill disc or try hddg (hard disc drive guru) you will find them both on google.

tonynw