Isolating Bad Sectors?

MrMacca

MrMacca

MrMacca

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My Hard drive that I store my Music and Pictures on has developed Bad sectors in certain areas.

The drive works fine apart from those bad sectors, however sometimes some of my files are stored in the bad sectors and then corruption occurs.

I understand the best thing I can do is replace the drive, but for the moment I am unable to do this due to lack of Funds.

Therefore I'm wondering if anyone knows any Applications or tips that I can scan my hard drive with, find the bad sectors and then possibly putting these bad sectors so they are not available to be used for storage.

The drive is an IDE Samsung SP1614N if that is any help.

So does anybody know anything I can do in the mean time?
 
MrMacca said:
So does anybody know anything I can do in the mean time?
Click to expand...
Seriously, the first and most important thing is to back up any valuable data while you still can - your drive is at death's door.

I do appreciate how lack of funds can be a problem, and if you only want to use the PC for surfing the net and so on, I guess you could carry on until the drive packs up entirely (which I suspect won't be in the too distant future).

Run chkdsk c: /f /r from the command line (if you have more than one partition on the drive, do it for each drive letter) - for the system partition, you'll need to reboot. Windows will identify and try to reallocate any bad sectors it finds, marking the bad sectors as unusable as it goes, but if the platter surfaces have been badly damaged due to a head crash (the most likely cause for the OS finding bad sectors, unless the drive was faulty from the factory), it tends to be a self-perpetuating process with the damage getting progressively worse at a faster and faster rate.

I'm afraid the bottom line is that your drive is toast and you really do need to replace it as soon as funds allow.
 
I'm afraid as CaptainCrash said the most likely outcome is progressive and accelerating spread of problems until the drive is unuseable... so get backing up...
 
Gotta agree with the advice above, backup, backup and then backup some more :)

For checking/reallocating bad sectors there's a utility on Hirens Boot CD that will scan the entire disk and try to recover and reallocate any bad sectors, it can make a sick disk better to some extent but all you're doing is delaying the death.
 
Yeah you're all right. I'll just have to try and scrape something together and try not to use it as much as I normally do until it is replaced. I just thought that with there being 50gig of free space I might have been able to salvage and utilise some of it until I can get it replaced.

Cheers Fellas
 
never worth the hassle mate, if chkdsk can't fix it then tbh, it's usually beyond repair (other program might have temp fixes) but it's not worth the time/effort.
 
The drives controller should be automatically mapping out the bad sectors. If its not, chances are the drive has run out of "spare" sectors for hotfixing. I would imagine the drive will continue to deteriorate. Replace it :(
 
I've had an old USB drive with bad sectors for years, it never mapped out the bad sectors, but I just left a corrupted file on the bad bit so I dont keep hitting it. Since I did that, its been fine.
 
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