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Software to mask bad sectors.

C

Compman55

Golden Member
I have a junk 250GB hard drive that has bad sectors. If yo load an OS on it, the OS will never load up. However if you just put junk on it like pic, music, dvds it will work.

I want to use this to test OS installs as it will always need to be formatted again. Is there software that will mark all the secotrs bad and allow me to install the OS.

Zeroing makes it look good, but then they come back.

I just want to use it as a test drive instead of scrapping it.
 
Don't quick format. A full format takes a long time because it is looking for bad sectors (I am certain this is true of NTFS in Windows, and EXT2/3/4 in Linux--not sure about any less mainstream FSes, like FAT* or HPFS*). When the OS comes on a bad sector, it marks that FS block bad, and won't re-use it.

If a full format isn't doing the job, then it's not worth keeping even as a test drive, because sectors are going bad, while they have necessary data on them (or, there's some other problem, and the bad sectors are merely a symptom, rather than the problem being on the platter).
 
CHKDSK /R for Windows will do the same thing as a full format if you don't want to reformat. It also will take forever.

This assumes it isn't a controller issue however.
 
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