how can I get rid of bad clusters?

[Duckers]

While running a scandisk I noticed that several clusters in my hard drive were bad. I have a Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 30 GB, 7200 RPM.

I was talking to some of the guys who hang all the time in the aol chat room 'Mac or PC' and all of them told me that there is no way to fix a damaged cluster.

I called Maxtor and they told me that these damaged clusters can be fixed using a Maxtor Diagnostic Utility that came with the drive. I believe it makes a low level format. They told me that this problem was caused due to 'software' and it didn't mean that the hard drive was damaged.

I was just wondering how accurate was all this info.

 

[Gunbuster]

Might be software or a true hardware defect. You can low level to dump "false" software bad areas. If it's a true hardware drefect RMA the drive quick. Either way Maxtor will want you to run their happy little utility.

 

[Duckers]

well, their utility has 3 tests, Quick Test, Read Test and Write Test.

The first 2 failed. I am currently running the third one though.

 

[corkyg]

What happens with LLF and other utilities is that the bad clusters are simply mapped out of the system's (and yours) cognizance.

 

[Duckers]

and therefore I keep losing hard drive space everytime I 'fix' a damaged cluster, right?

If this is what the Maxtor Utility is doing, how can I convince them to give me a new drive?

 

[Gunbuster]

Tell them it makes a clanking noise and wont read.

 

[Factor5]

Get a hdd fan, i had 2 hdd's an inch apart, the top one fried, i was lucky it was only my old 8.4g, over half the drive has bad sectors

 

[Duckers]

Gunbuster,

Do you happen to know who has to send the drive first?

I need the hard drive and I can't stay a week waiting for the RMA to arrive. I was also going to ask them if I could pay the difference so they could send me a 40 GB hard drive

 

[Gunbuster]

They will cross ship as long as you give them your CC number in case you dont send the broken one back.

 

[dszd0g]

Here was a good discussion on LLF'ing to get rid of bad sectors:

http://forums.anandtech.com/arcmessageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=196661

 

[Duckers]

That sucks man, if doing a low level format is dangerous and isn't fixing anything, then why does Maxtor makes people do it ? :|

I will definitely call those bastards and tell them that my hard drive doesn't spin at all. Hopefully I didn't give them a lot of info when I called them this morning.

The first thing they ask is my phone number, I will just give them a fake phone number or call them from my friend's house; in case they trace the phone numbers to verify the authenticity of the call.

 

[dszd0g]

Don't bother giving them the fake phone numbers. Bad sectors points to a drive that is failing 90% of the time. Just tell them they gave bad advice and the drive isn't even spinning up anymore. If you want to have fun with them describe to them the sound of a head crash :> I'm just playing more than anything else.

They are semi-correct. Sometimes viruses will mark sectors bad that aren't.. I heard one guy whose Windows install was so buggy it was marking sectors bad and that a low level format fixed his problems. There is about a 10% chance they are correct and it will fix your problems and never come back.

In my opinion, you should return the drive.

 

[Duckers]

well, when I ran scan disk I ran it from DOS, so I don't know if Windows has to do anything with this.

On the other hand, I believe there are 2 options here: either those bad sectors are corrupted data or the drive is physically damaged.

I haven't messed a lot with this drive since I bought it in April. I partitioned the hard drive when I bought it and about a week ago because i needed to resize the partitions.

Of course I would like to get a new hard drive; but this might be a minor problem as well.

 

[Tominator]

Always run scandisk from a command prompt or use Norton Utilities. Chances are there is nothing wrong with the drive! If you choose to 'fix' in scandisk, all it does i hide the 'bad' cluster. I'd go with the advice from Maxtor and lowformat.

 

[Duckers]

After running the Maxtor Utility to write 0's and after partitioning and formatting the hard drive; I ran Scandisk from DOS and it didn't find any bad cluster!!

I am just wondering whether it didn't find them because they were 'hidden' or because the bad clusters I was seeing before were just a false alarm.

 

[dszd0g]

It marked them good. Whether they were bad in the first place can not be determined yet. If you find more bad sectors in a month or so they were bad. If you go years with out finding another bad sector they were probably falsely marked.

Hard drives these days have a reallocation table, so that around 10% (Sometimes I've seen as high as 20%) of the drive has to be bad sectors before scandisk will even see them if they are actually bad sectors. If you are seeing real bad sectors, your drive is already pretty bad.

 

[busterbrown]

Buy a copy of Steve Gibson's Spinrite program at www.spinrite.com. It's about $40.00 and you can download it after paying for it. If the cluster marked bad is still good, the program will restore it. Spinrite has been the standard for working with HDD's since the 1980's. Scandisk is very liberal in marking clusters as "bad" and scandisk usually finds that they are in fact good.

One tip for using Spinrite: The restore bad sectors setting is really slow. Use the # 1 setting to quickly get near the area of the bad cluster, then change the setting to restore bad sectors