bad sectors

[GangStarr]

can some1 pls help me. I have got bad sectors on my 160 gig HDD its driving me MAD!!!
I did everything, did searches on the net, read forums and no help.
it tells me delayed write fail. I used system mechanic to repair... no help.
did a chkdsk nothing defragged ( took me a day ) i think the drive is broke but I cant get a new 1 as of yet so im gonna have to find a temp fix ( plus there are things I cant lose on there ) i say HDD regen and it looks like it might work but erm... im not gonna pay for it. i mean if it dont work then it was a waste.
please help

 

[ant1b0dy]

Get hold of SpinRite 6 (grc.com)- it can actually recover bad sectors on your hard drive. I used it on a hard drive that had a whole bunch of bad sectors and it fixed them all. I've been using the drive without problems since.

It's an awesome tool.

 

[GangStarr]

thnx bru.
I could kiss you but erm.... ja

 

[werner]

youu cant fix bad sectors. If they are bad, then so be it.

What you can do is remap bad sectors to UNUSED, working parts of the drive specifically meant for this purpose.
OK, lemme elaborate...
NO DRIVE HAS ZERO BAD SECTORS, they ALL have bad sectors, right outta the factory. BUT drive manufacturers cater for this in firmware and by actually adding extra capacity to the drive, so, in simple terms, your 160gb drive has probably got 161gb of drive platter space, with 1gb reserved for bad sector remapping. The remapping happens on the fly, transparent to the end user.

ergo, by the time you see bad sectors in your OS, it means the bad sector pool has been depleted already and you now have no "spare" sectors to remap...

Spinrite rereads sectors many many times, often extracting certain parts of the data, then stitching the data together and writing it to a known good sector, then either remapping the bad sector (if the drive firmware didnt do it) or marking it as permanently bad.

But, once you have bad sectors, they will always remain on the drive, there is no "fix"...and more than likely they will continue to increase in quantity.

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Gaaaayyyyyyy

 

[The_Unbeliever]

In my Novell 3.12 days we would chuck out and replace any hard drive that started to develop bad sectors, because it was an indication of a failing drive.

 

[ant1b0dy]

What you can do is remap bad sectors to UNUSED, working parts of the drive specifically meant for this purpose.

Extra space specially for bad sectors? That sounded a little dodgy so I did some googling and found this interesting article:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=14597

Apparently it's possible to reclaim extra space from your hard drive:

Interesting results to date:
Western Digital 200GB SATA
Yield after recovery: 510GB of space

IBM Deskstar 80GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 150GB of space

Maxtor 40GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 80GB

Seagate 20GB EIDE
Yield after recovery: 30GB

Unknown laptop 80GB HDD
Yield: 120GB

Sounds too good to be true... so it probably is...

 

[werner]

that was a con...I'm not even going to read the link, but I can bet it had something to do with norton ghost, and stopping the process half way so that the partition table is screwy.

similar con to the "4gb" flash drives you can buy on ebay which actually are 128mb units.

but, true, there is extra, RESERVED, space on hdd's for use by the firmware to do bad sector remapping.
linky: http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/geom/formatDefect.html

 

[The_Unbeliever]

The extra space on HDD's is usually reserved for bad sector remapping.

Older drives, most notably the first 10Mb/20Mb MFM jobbies, didn't have this feature, so they would test the hard drive at the factory, and print a bad sector list on the hard drive itself, so you can map the bad blocks with whichever utility you usually use.

I remember that my first 286PC had a Seagate 40Mb HDD, and boy, that HDD was so reliable and solid, you could kick it while it was working with no ill effects or data loss...

So, in a nutshell, if you lost some data mysteriously recently, you can blame the remapping feature of the hard drive.

 

[JTech]

not even going to argue here...
Continuing to use a hard disk that has started to get bad sectors is a risk. You run the risk of the entire drive crashing at a very inopportune time. I have had the unpleasant experience of losing everything because I didn't replace my hard disk and allowed it to keep going with the bad sectors.

 

[LandyMan]

That brings us to the next question: How do you know the drive has bad sectors? Only during a Defrag or chkdsk, or what?

 

[bdt]

That brings us to the next question: How do you know the drive has bad sectors? Only during a Defrag or chkdsk, or what?

..or you could be S.M.A.R.T. about it and get the data straight from the drive. Switch that feature on (usually in BIOS) and use a program that can read that data (notebook users might consider NHC (formerly CHC) instead). Note that reading SMART data works only on drives in native IDE/SATA modes: once you RAID drives together, they appear to the OS (talking about 'doze here) as a SCSI drive and thus not SMART capable ..that I know of, I'd happily been shown as being wrong this (mainly 'cos I'm wanting access to SMART for RAID-connected drives and haven't found it anywhere yet!)

 

[JTech]

The so-called S.M.A.R.T. feature is a crock of ****, causes problems with some Linux installations and on one very specific machine of mine it causes the machine to display "primary master hard disk fail" followed by a spontaneous reset.

The first sign of a bad sector is a system crash when saving a file, or corrupted files, or your OS fails to boot with strange error messages. As it is not always possible to detect bad sectors I regularly scan my drives. Another sign of a bad sector is if your computer takes really long to read stuff off the drive, and makes repetitive noises, like it's struggling to read (may not be possible to hear on more modern drives)

 

[stoke]

Also watch out for the one drive buggering up the other drive scenario.

I have a computer with a Western Digital [WD] and a Segate Bigfoot on the same IDE channel. Segate is Prim, WD is slave.

The Segate started getting bad sectors and seem'd to be falling apart but every time I checked the drive for bad secotrs wthere was nothing wrong with it. Eventually - after 4 months of struggling my *** off I gave up, unplugged the drive and made the WD my primary - installed the OS and started over.

1 day later the problems started again - this time on the WD, so I thought maybe it was the controller, but had no way of proving that .. but then I figured ... erk .. to prove it's the controller, install the Segate again.

I installed the segate as primary with the WD unplugged, and everything ran like it's supposed to.

I ran like that for 3 weeks and then plugged the WD in and after 20 minutes of operation started getting bad sectors [write failures to the Segate].

Light dawned on marble head. Damn WD was buggering up and causing problems with the Segate.

I threw the WD onto the braai and made it hot. Best move I eva made.

 

[bdt]

Better a crock of **** that at least puts you in range of (at least some) info ..on 'doze machines anyway. Thankfully (in a somewhat twisted way) this OS is far less hi-performance than Loonix which tends to mean less critical reactions, like you mention there JTech. Also, if nothing else, it puts you in range (just looked at the data NHC gives me) of being able to read the historical/trend data on your drives which at least means being more informed.

 

[krycor]

my hdd sometimes goes into standby + normal over and over and crashes when i switch off + on my pc sometimes. Been doing that for a yr now.. here's to another yr of service

 

[GangStarr]

hm..... this is going deep now.
well Im gonna try to c what happens tonight with that proggie. if it doesnt work then im gonna invest in a HHD and try to backup 150 gig of data

grrrrrr thats what I get for working for telkom (at least telkom was the ppl who filled it up for me )

 

[JTech]

crashes when i switch off + on my pc sometimes. Been doing that for a yr now.. here's to another yr of service

Crash... as in the drive cannot read anymore and makes grinding noises sometimes but is otherwise permanenty fcuked! Quite different from controller failure.The term comes from some books I studied in my youth about hard disks and has somehow stuck.

The "crash" on power-down is the hard disk controller pulling the heads off the platters.

Some people think I am really stupid. Well guess what, I am not OK. I may not know everything but I do have some good experience in some very specific areas.

 

[JTech]

HHD and try to backup 150 gig of data

Norton Ghost is your friend... but then again I will probably be wrapped over the knuckles for suggesting it to you instead of some l33t program that the other ppl on this forum use...

 

[krycor]

no crash pc erh o/s win xp but yah i did hear it bark once and make a odd beep noise. -shrug- no bad sectors though.