Working around bad sectors on a boot drive

[MustISO]

Laptop hard drive works just fine except there are bad sectors in the first partition of the drive. System won't read past that boot to boot up. Is it possible to exclude these sectors so that I could use the drive again? Even if I had to exclude the first 1/4 of the drive that would be fine.

 

[Blain]

MHDD... remap

 

[MustISO]

Tried MHDD, it was unable to detect the drive. Not sure why, I can see the drive fine in Windows and other programs see the drive.

 

[Blain]

Try creating a boot CD with the older version 4.5

 

[pitz]

By the time a modern drive with defect re-mapping 'presents' bad sectors to the user, the damage to the drive, in most cases, is already considerable.

So time to toss it and buy a replacement if you can't RMA it.

 

[pcgeek11]

By the time a modern drive with defect re-mapping 'presents' bad sectors to the user, the damage to the drive, in most cases, is already considerable.

So time to toss it and buy a replacement if you can't RMA it.

This is the only reliable way around it.

 

[Nothinman]

By the time a modern drive with defect re-mapping 'presents' bad sectors to the user, the damage to the drive, in most cases, is already considerable.

So time to toss it and buy a replacement if you can't RMA it.

This. If it's to the point where you're getting errors about bad sectors that means the included sectors reserved for replacement have been exhausted.

If you really want to try working around it while you get a replacement, chkdsk can do that. But consider it like running your car on a doughnut, it might work longer than recommended but it's really, really not smart.

 

[Old Hippie]

Working around bad sectors on a boot drive is best done by throwing the drive in the trash. :biggrin:

 

[razel]

Check online to see if the drive manufacturer has any diagnosis utilities to download. Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi all do. Their utilities will remap bad sectors with new ones. You will need to ensure that it is connected native-ly (SATA or E-IDE) and not via USB.

Yes you can exclude the 1st quarter portion. Just create two partitions. 1st one covers the 1st 1/4 and don't use it... don't even format it.

And yes like others have mentioned... it is time to start saving for a replacement.

 

[MustISO]

Drive is going to be replaced for sure, just doing this more for educational purpose. Wanted to know if it was possible and how to go about doing it.

 

[rsutoratosu]

spinrite, has many level of test