More life from hard disk with bad sectors

Hi All

One of my hard disks continued to develop bad sectors and every time I
was using format to mark the bad sectors. Suddenly I got an idea of
not only marking the bad sector but also keeping the head from
accessing areas around the bad sector.

By the time I did this to my hard disks it had only 1 gb of its 2 gb
capacity usable. (You can imagine the number of bad sectors!).

The bad sectors developed during a three month period. After marking
the areas so the read head did not go anywhere near the bad sectors I
have been using this hard disk for more than two years without any new
bad sector appearing!

You can read my experience here

http://members.tripod.com/~diligent/ninelives.htm

HTH

 

For Christ's sake, just throw the dam thing away. Who in their right mind
wants a 2GB hard drive that's rife with bad sectors???

Please, go away and don't come back!

 

As soon as a HD begins to develop more than a very few bad sectors then
assume the HD is DOA as the rest will go bad soon. Replace the HD. We'll
keep your post as perfect proof of this point.

 

I consider anything > 0 bad sectors as meaning "The drive is dying,
immediately replace it"

 

Nonsense. Your drive had bad sectors when it was shipped.

 

lol, back in the old days (286, 386) harddrives weren't cheap so when an hd
developed bad sectors, the bad sector areas was partitioned off and never
used again

 

Not that are visible. By the time you see any, there are really
quite a few. That's different from a few random ones at the time
of manufacture.

 

Still are. But it's handled transparently by drive now. When an IDE drive
is showing bad sectors it generally means that it's got more than the
onboard sparing can handle, which means that it's _real_ bad.

 

There are hundreds of initial bad sectors on each of my three SCSI drives.

It is quite normal to develop a few new ones each year, and that does NOT
indicate the drive is failing. Normally they are not visible, because they are
corrected and remapped.

 

SMART monitering will tell you when if the device is within
manufacturer's tolerances. Everest from Lavalist is a nice package
(free for noncommercial use.) I don't have a link handy.

With XP I've seen an event log entry following a perceptable pause on
my PC. The log showed that a block had just meen remapped.

If I see a single additional block remapped on a machine being used
for revenue-producing business use I plan to swap that disk
out, asap.

I'd mark the disk and use it for some don't-care-if-burns purpose.
The disk doesn't get a third chance.

 

Several possible flaws in your method.

1) only works for drives smaller than 8GB

2) no drive has 256 physical heads and 63 sectors per track so
1 logical cylinder is already many physical cylinders
With 4 heads and ~600 sectors/tr. you already reserve ~6
physical cylinders per logical cylinder.

3) it's not the heads that need keeping away from the damaged
spots but the slider that they are mounted on, which is much
wider. The slider can cover into the hundreds of cylinders.

Btw, why not finish the experiment and zero-write the whole
drive and use it as one normally would, and see what happens.

If your theory is correct it should soon die. Somehow, I doubt that.

 

Well, maybe you should look into your S.M.A.R.T. data then, every hour.
It might be in it's death throws already and you not even know it.

 

Modern hard drives do bad block forwarding, invisible to the operating
system and thus the end user. If you start actually seeing bad blocks
it means that all the spares have been used and the drive is in the
process of dying a grievous death.

 

Clueless gibberish. Read my and Folkert's reply to J Clarke.

 

My experience is that Blake is correct. Bad blocks, once seen, grow like
weeds.

 

Ja mein hier!

 

Ron Reaugh wrote:

DOA? Dead on arrival???

You silly bugger.

 

Many of us have reported seeing bad blocks caused by power problems,
which cease when that is fixed.

The explanation "running out of spare sectors" is absolutely idiotic. It is
not possible to remap that many without getting lots of prior warning.

 

And another one from the school of hard knocks.

No, that is not what he said, it has nothing to do with the spare
pool being exhausted. Only how a "bad" sector manifests itself.

Yup, until you stop what's causing them.
Unrecoverable read error bad sectors are usually
caused by bad power supply or drives overheating.

["Clueless gibberish" snipped]

 

Another clueless parrot troll.