Saving Hard Drives With Bad Sectors

[sfreeman]

Is there any way of making a hard drive with bad sectors usable and reliable ?

Thanks....

 

[vietofmars]

Buy a new one to replace it. Back up your data now.

 

[DannyBoy]

not totally reliable no.

However, you can run a surface scan in scan disk and quarantine the bad sectors, or use tools such as norton to do the same.

 

[AnyMal]

Bad sectors are unrecoverable unfortunately, but you can live with few of them. As suggested, back up your data ASAP, and plan on getting a new drive soon. You can not "quarantine" bad sectors, as they are not virtual but a physical part of your disk.

 

[DannyBoy]

Originally posted by: AnyMal
Bad sectors are unrecoverable unfortunately, but you can live with few of them. As suggested, back up your data ASAP, and plan on getting a new drive soon. You can not "quarantine" bad sectors, as they are not virtual but a physical part of your disk.

Actually yes you can, a surface scan can by writing the bad sector information to the MBR of the drive's partition.

This stops the drive from attempting to write to those sectors.

Dan

 

[egale]

A drive that develops bad sectors is dying!!!! Backup whatever you can and replace ASAP!! You can hide the bad sectors with Norton or chkdsk but more will appear and there is no telling when.

 

[deadseasquirrel]

If you don't feel like buying a new drive just yet, you could always try this proggie. Not sure if it works or what, but give it a shot. My thoughts are, even if it repairs the bad sectors... the hdd got those bad sectors somehow in the first place, so I would think more would continue to show up over time. I don't know if the hdd manufacturer would replace under warranty with only some bad sectors. Be sure to run a utility program from your hdd manufacturer and see if it comes up bad and can be replaced under warranty.