Hard drive repair

[G0AOZ]

In the commercial world it is usually best to replace a hard drive that starts showing several either bad or very slow to read data blocks. Outside of this (commercial) world, one or two of my users have few funds available to buy new, and I have on occasions managed to 'revive' a poorly performing hard drive by using MHDD.

However, this utility does not seem to have the ability to allow slow reading blocks to be manually locked out. Does anyone know of a utility that would allow me to lock out specifically defined block numbers on an IDE or SATA drive?

I've tried the sample (trial) version of HDD Regenerator, but this doesn't seem to offer that facility. Spinrite also doesn't appear offer options of this type, and having determined that a block is ok, doesn't lock it out of course.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[BadBigBen]

Ah, those where the days of MSDOS, CP/M and other FS, where you could run a program, and it would allocate the bad sector and fool the FS into thinking it was used...

The only way I know of how to do it these days, would be to use the manufacturers tools (e.g. SeaTools for Seagate and Maxtor drives) and have them surface scan a drive, they in turn lock a bad sector and try to recover the data on them, so I would totally nuke the drive first aka. LowLevel Format (though this is a misnomer these days, as a true LLF cannot be done anymore, from my understanding, except at the factory)...

maybe someone else knows of ways to do it...

Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[edfair]

Well, you could always edit the FAT. If there isn't a link there it can't be used. It would be a matter of changing the forward link on the LKG cluster to one beyond the imperfection.

But it has been a long time since I've done it and I haven't had experience beyond FAT12, FAT16, and some other operating systems.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.