HDD question - Tool to GENEROUSLY mark (or occupy) BAD SECTORs

[NotSure]

If you need my attention, please leave a comment here:
http://miscellaneous-sonstiges.blogspot.com/2010/08/hard-drive-bad-sector-tool-wish.html

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Hello, fellow hardware/software contortionists!

PREMISE:

Make old harddrives of reasonable size (20gig or more) USABLE
AGAIN???
A nice windows XP version (e.gb. "stripped to the bone edition") is
sufficient for an "internet surfing" machine and there are more old
computers than one knows what to do with...

WISH:

I am looking for a tool that

- works under DOS (or Linux preferably knoppix)
- and tests a HardDrive
- and marks sectors as BAD (**PLUS** neighboring sectors)

like so:

it goes through a freshly formatted partition FAT32
and ON THE SLIGHTEST DELAY (re-read) ... it OCCUPIES THE SECTOR ..
**AND 50 NEIGHBOURING sectors** with a file

in order to avoid windows using this area of the Hard Drive.
in order to avoid windows using this area of the Hard Drive.

BOTTOM LINE:

I don't care if the drive looses a gigabyte or three.
As long as it works FAST and TROUBLE FREE.

Yes, I know, this can not be quaranteed, and YES I KNOW that HDDs -
once having developed badsectors - will go worse.

YES, I still want to work with "bad " drives.. I have quite a few of
them.
YES, I have time to monitor and play. I have more time than money.


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Here the results of my google-ing

http://www.google.com/search?q=sectors+bad+neighboring

"ADRC Data Recovery Tools
To reduce the number of tedious retries, whenever a bad sector is
encountered, the program will intelligently search the neighboring
sectors to determine the extent of bad blocks and mathematically
calculate the number of retires needed."

My ideal tools does not "calculate" it simply GERNEROUSLY marks
sektors as bad,
taking

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If you need my attention, please leave a comment here:
http://miscellaneous-sonstiges.blogspot.com/2010/08/hard-drive-bad-sector-tool-wish.html

 

[David Brown]

If you need my attention, please leave a comment here:
http://miscellaneous-sonstiges.blogspot.com/2010/08/hard-drive-bad-sector-tool-wish.html

===


Hello, fellow hardware/software contortionists!

PREMISE:

Make old harddrives of reasonable size (20gig or more) USABLE
AGAIN???
A nice windows XP version (e.gb. "stripped to the bone edition") is
sufficient for an "internet surfing" machine and there are more old
computers than one knows what to do with...

Quite apart from the hard disk issue, there's the question of why on
earth you would want to use windows for such a machine? Clearly you are
no stranger to Linux, so I'd have thought a lightweight Linux distro
would be a much better choice.

As for how to check the disks, why not just use something like "dd
if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=65536" to read through the disk a few times
- if there are errors, then the sectors should be marked as bad by the
drive itself.

I don't think there is any theoretical or empirical grounds for thinking
that when one sector is bad the neighbour sector has a greater chance of
errors than any other sector.

And if you want to make a dodgy disk a bit less likely to fail, you
could always divide it into two partitions and use raid1 (on Linux) on
the two partitions. It will not do wonders for your performance, and
may even make the disk die sooner due to the increased head movement,
but it could make the data last slightly longer.