Help on Freeware for Scanning Harddisk Bad Sectors

[WANG, Xiaoyun]

Hi, all,

My IBM 40G harddisk is 5 years old. Recently I found several I/O errors
on it and it seems to have a few bad sectors. When being accessed to
the specific location, the harddisk screams like hell and after several
minutes, returns failure. The problem is running checkdisk from WINXP
does not seems to be able to repair or mark the bad sectors.

I had the same problem about 2 years ago and I ended up renaming
several files to "BADSECTOR" to keep the location from being
re-accessed, which was quite annoying. After some time I formatted the
disk to NTFS(FAT32 previously) and it has been working fine since. Now
I encounter the problem again! Is there a freeware which may be able to
handle the bad sector problem?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Daniel Mandic]

Hi Wang!



It seems your HD is breaking down, slowly. NTFS can spare out damaged
blocks, as well as FAT32/16/12 can do.

low-level formatting with the !manufacturer!-software (take the long
version) can help. And then formatting with MS-OS, or any else.

PowerMAX (DOS Bootdisk with Utilityprogram) for example, when having a
MAXTOR Harddisk.



Best Regards,

Daniel Mandic

 

[Gabriele Neukam]

On that special day, WANG, Xiaoyun, ([email protected]) said...

My IBM 40G harddisk

Is it a Deskstar? Then you can call yourself lucky, that it did work
for so long. Better copy all important files on CDrom and try to get a
replacement. Five years are quite an accomplishment for a Deskstar.


Gabriele Neukam

(e-mail address removed)

 

[jedisb]

You might also try the following. They are bootable CDs with tons of
free utilities:

Ulitmate Boot CD: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
(Includes several HD manufacturer's disk utilities)

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows: http://www.ubcd4win.com/

 

[Chris Dubea]

On that special day, WANG, Xiaoyun, ([email protected]) said...


Is it a Deskstar? Then you can call yourself lucky, that it did work
for so long. Better copy all important files on CDrom and try to get a
replacement. Five years are quite an accomplishment for a Deskstar.


Gabriele Neukam

(e-mail address removed)

Concur completely. At one time I had 4 of them. None of them are now
functioning. I "used" to be a big IBM drive fan.

I recommend Maxtor because I had a mirrored pair of 125gb drives that
was immersed in brackish water for about 1/2 a hour after Hurricane
Katrina flooded my house. I cleaned them off (and the Adaptec Raid
card) put them in another machine and fired them right up and got my
data off.
===========================================================================
Chris