Need help repairing hard drive - bad sectors.

[slave]

Hi all

A colleague of mine has a 100GB portable Lacie drive. He's been having some hassles with it and yesterday performed a standard windows quick format. I then tried loading some data for him but after a while the copy failed. It appears there are some bad sectors on the drive. Can anyone recommend a tool(pref freeware)/approach that will allow us to mark off the bad sectors so that the rest of the drive is usable. There is no data on the drive that needs to be recovered.

Tried a full format with windows but that seems to hang after a while. Have done a surface scan and there are definitiely bad sectors but don't have a way of marking them as bad.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Freaksta]

If you know what type of drive is in it, download the tools for that type of drive and it should repair it.. EG seatools.. Otherwise try leaving the drive on when booting up and windows might try scan the disk and fix it when booting up.

 

[ponder]

Unfortunately the drive can only reallocate so many bad sectors and it's usually an indication that it's failing so toss it.

You could try and use a utility like MHDD or Victoria to do a SCAN & REMAP (they are available in english) http://hddguru.com/software/ You would have to remove the drive from the enclosure and connect it directly to a motherboard via PATA/SATA. I would also advice you to disconnect all other drives when using the above utils as you can seriously bork things if you selct the wrong drive.

 

[slave]

Thanks for the input guys. I tried googling lacie but there is no definitive answer as to the internal drive. Some suggest seagate so I'm busy downloading Seatools. I am also currently running a low-level format using HDDGURU-Low-Level-Format-Tool. Will let you know how it goes.

 

[ponder]

You really should remove that drive from the enclosure.

 

[repitah]

Try using HDDscan (3.2 works best for me when performing tests, but 3.3 seems to use the SMART data better). Has helped me a few times to recognise drives inside enclosures.