can bad sectors be marked without formatting?

[denpgeorge]

I have a Maxtor 160GB PATA drive with one dynamic volume on it. (windows xp)

Disk Management says this disk is unreadable and wont let me mount it. The system event viewer has all sorts of errors.

I get a bunch of these:
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1\D.

And a couple of these:
dmio: Harddisk1 write error at block 320173055: status 0xc0000185
(a few different blocks each time)

And one of these every boot up:
dmboot: Failed to auto-import disk group DennisDg0. All volumes in the disk group are not available.

I only started getting these messages after I got these two which also happened to be right after I installed Norton Systemworks 2004. Dont know if that has anything to do with it:
Disk group DennisDg0: Errors in some configuration copies:
Disk Harddisk1, copy 1: Block 0: Invalid magic number in the configuration copy

INTERNAL Error - The disk group contains no valid configuration copies (C10000B6).

I dont know if there is some sort of problem because the drive is greater than 160GB or what, but the maxtor software says Im already set up for 48bit lba addressing. Besides, the drive was working fine before! I have the latest nforce2 drivers for my controller. I've got a gigabyte 7NNXP board.

I tried with and without other drives on the same controller, every combo of master/slave... Only this drive has the problem, so I dont think its the controller. I downloaded Maxtor's Powerblast software, and ran the extended test. I think it does a surface read scan of the entire drive, and it says TESTS PASSED. Im running Western Digital's DLG software on it now, and looks like I'll have the same results.

Im using Active SMART Monitor and it buzzes every so often with a warning on the Spin Up Time of the maxtor drive, yet all the SMART tests pass with the powerblast software... I dont get it. It tells me the drive has until 7/19/2004 till its a gonner. yay...

I really just want to get my data out, and it seems like reads are working fine. I figure if I can move the data thats in the blocks where I'm getting write errors out and mark them bad, I should be able to mount it and get my stuff out. Only thing is, the only way I see to mark bad sectors is to do a low level format. I DONT WANT TO!! What can I do?

Surely its possible to do write tests on the drive without formatting? Read the sector and save it.. Write something, check if it worked... Write back what was there and go on to the next sector... Surely... Am I wrong and just plain SOL?

 

[gsellis]

Hmm...

To start, if Smart is getting activated on the drive, it is destined to die soon. Even if it does test out ok, it is the exception that is launching the Smart logic that will get you.

I do not know a remedy as you cannot mount it. Normally, if the drive would mount, a CHKDSK d: /R and scheduling to check the disk on restart would then do the exhaustive search and mark. But since you cannot mount it inside the OS, I am not sure how to help. I would use Win PE and see if I could mount it there, BUT, you may not have access to PE.

Having not used such, this may be bogus info, but maybe you can boot off of one of the free LINUX CDs and access it to at least do the file copy?

Just had a thought... You do not have the drive set to delayed start, right? Even if it was, Smart should not flag on that, so it was just a wierd idea.

Edit: Also, maybe boot on a XP CD and get to the recovery phase. I think you can get to the recovery console and maybe it will mount there?