HD damaged blocks

[soldano]

I tested my 500GB SATA2 disk with HD Tune 255, and in the middle of the bench it always stop with an reading error warning.-
When I ran an error scan, 3 damaged blocks appeared (0,1%).- Is there a way to repair them ?
The health status report is OK (3 of the lines showed in yellow but OK)
Thanks

 

[Rubycon]

I use spinrite 6.0. It's not free ($90 IIRC) but worth it to fix these issues. The OS will no longer "see" the damaged blocks. Operating with damaged blocks is risky and makes it impossible to image/clone the drive properly or at all.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: soldano
I tested my 500GB SATA2 disk with HD Tune 255, and in the middle of the bench it always stop with an reading error warning.-
When I ran an error scan, 3 damaged blocks appeared (0,1%).- Is there a way to repair them ?
The health status report is OK (3 of the lines showed in yellow but OK)
Thanks

Which HD is this?
If it has a warranty, then I would RMA it.
I would also enable SMART, just in the off chance that it may detect issues with the HD itself.
While spinrite can help, there is no guarantee that it can, and in some cases, it can make things worse. By that, I mean, I know someone who ran it on their HD, and after the 55 hour(!) marathon run, the drive itself no longer responded. So he couldn't access the HD any more, and all data was basically lost, and he had to send it out to a disaster recovery place.

I think it is far better to backup all data (if possible), and if you can't, then you could first try testdisk (which is free), and if that don't work well, then you could buy spinrite and see if it may help.

 

[Rubycon]

Well one thing I've noticed with Spin Rite is if it sits on a spot for more than a few hours chances are it's not going to finish and the drive (if in an unusable state) has valuable data it should be sent to a data recovery professional.

In the case of the OP, however, it should be fine.

I have a barely used 150GB velociraptor that would not image (Acronis). Ran HD Tune Pro and found a single red block. Ran spinrite on it (no. 2) and then the block was gone and imaging is fine. Of course it would happen to one of the disks that were removed from the "ice pack" so warranty but it's still kicking and is just a scratch drive now.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: Rubycon
I use spinrite 6.0. It's not free ($90 IIRC) but worth it to fix these issues.

Finally I find a SpinRite user! :thumbsup::laugh:

Do you use it mainly for disaster recovery or as a HD maintenance tool?

 

[dunkster]

It's been a few years now, but the Western Digital HDDIAG diagnostic program solved a similar problem for me.

I had a bad block in the area used by my OS partition. Running HDDIAG in Quick Test mode, it reported a problem, then switched to the full test, then repaired the disk. On completion, HDDIAG repaired the problem by reading the data from the bad block, wrote the data from the bad block to a known-good block, and marked the bad block to prevent re-use.

I don't use the drive currently (80GB IDE drive), but it still works if I choose to use it.

It won't always reliably fix the problem, since if HDDIAG can't read the data from the bad block, it can't complete the repair.

Worth a try.

Hope this helps!

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: Rubycon
I use spinrite 6.0. It's not free ($90 IIRC) but worth it to fix these issues.

Finally I find a SpinRite user! :thumbsup::laugh:

Do you use it mainly for disaster recovery or as a HD maintenance tool?

Sometimes when a system won't boot it may be too late to save the drive.

What I've had happen is interesting though. PC reboots itself constantly like Windows OS is damaged, right? Well Spin Rite works on the drive and finishes with a few R blocks or even a few U blocks. System restarts and boots right up. Immediately I make an image to a new drive and the day is saved.

On drives that come out of old systems I will use Spin Rite to see the condition of the drive. If the SMART status shows degrading margins or there are LOTS of errors I won't use the drive for anything I value - like the OS drive for an important system. There would be no other way to know the drive is flaky without (Spin Rite).

 

[soldano]

I used the Seagate Tools, (the Dos bootable floppy version), and it solved my problem.- I fixed the bad sectors.-
Thanks