about bad sectors

[rushtosri]

Hi friends,

I've heard that there r software on the net which can be used to remove bad sectors from floppies or harddisks. I've also heard that we can remove track 0 error also with these software. Is it true? If yes then please help me with site urls.

Awaiting for ur response
regards,
shri.

 

[edfair]

Do a search for spinrite. That is one that will recover bad sectors on a fat16 filesystem. I'm not sure what it does when tried on a 32 bit filesystem, or if it will even try.
Low level formats sometimes get rid of bad sectors, but they have a habit of coming back.
And as far as track 0 problems, if you have a questionable sector there it is a ticking time bomb that you will be better off not having. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[fenris]

From what I remember, you can't get rid of bad sectors. Take, for instance, scandisk. Scandisk basically looks at the disk and if it finds any bad sectors flags them so that the OS doesn't write to it.

There are always bad sectors, even on brand new drives, due to the manufacturing process. The new hard drive has a low level format done to it at the factor, so all the bad sectors are already flagged.

A track 0 error, I believe, is a problem with the master boot record. If you are using windows, try running fdisk /mbr from a bootable floppy.

Troy Williams E.I.T.
fenris@hotmail.com

 

[rushtosri]

Thankx for ur replies. Well, I'll try Spinrite as suggested by edfair. But I want to make it clear that the track 0 bad error I get with my floppy disks and not with my harddisk. So I was expecting any feedback to remove bad sectors and track 0 bad errors that I get with my floppy disks.

Will wait for ur replies..
regards,
shri.

 

[edfair]

Floppies are another problem. First step is another floppy. Next step another data cable.
Formatting a floppy /u rewrites the low level addresses. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[ceh4702]

Many of the hard drive manufacturers have utilities to do different things for hard drives to overriting the drive with zeros to rerwriting the fat table or boot sector. Maxtor has some different utilities at their website for harddrive, IBM had some utilities at their hard drive website also.

I ran accross a company that makes a program called Eraser. It is suppose to completely overwrite completely with random repeating patterns things you delete so it is extremely hard to recover them. You may want to look around on the internet a bit. I don't remember where the website is for the eraser program. That is more of a security issue with the eraser program. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.