80K and counting

[littlebitstrouds]

Had some clicking in my harddrive so I decided to run HDD Regenerator and it's been runnin for 12 hours now and has found 80k bad sectors and is still counting... will it repair these at the end or am I in a bad place, ikw order a new hd?

 

[Raj]

a clicking hard drive is like a clicking timebomb. the clicking sound you are hearing is the actuator arms that move across the platters to write data coming in contact with the platters. not a good sign. infact this is a good sign of a failing hard drive, and it usually progressively gets worst.

first thing I would do is back up the data, and then try to run this regenerator program.

 

[AluminumStudios]

Anything that runs on a failing HD for hours and hours is going to acclerate the inevitable. A hard drive that has bad sectors or makes noises simply needs to be taken out of commission unless you don't care about your data. Make your back-ups now.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I don't believe that "HDD Regenerator" does anything more than the mfg's diag program or SpinRite 6 would do. All it seems to do is trigger the drive's own internal sector-remap feature. If it's re-allocated 80K sectors - you're in trouble. With that many bad, you may have a bad/defective head actuator assembly. (Translation = drive is toast, buy a new one and/or RMA that one.)

If you want to save your data, whatever can be saved, I recommend using Ghost 2003 to do a "raw" image backup (sector-by-sector, not the default file-by-file), onto files on another HD, or directly to another HD of similar or larger size. (Use the "-fro" parameter, IIRC.) This will skip over sectors that cannot be read, and salvage as much readable data as possible. If those bad sectors are part of the partition table/FAT/etc., you will have futher problems, in which case you should run some serious data-recovery software on that backup image drive, in order to save your data. Best of luck.

PS. HDD Regenerator cannot actually repair any sectors at all, IDE HDs don't work that way. All they do is swap the "bad" sectors with a hidden "good" replacement sector, so that the computer doesn't see it as "bad" any more, but there is a limit on how many hidden "good" sectors that any one drive keeps secretly stashed away.