More life from hard disk with bad sectors

Could be. Unfortunately all my large disks have no bad sectors to
try with!

I have tried this with other drives earlier and bad sectors remained
bad :-(

As I said the particular drive progressively developed the bad sectors
during a period of three months - after doing what I did the disk is
continuing to work for me for a little more than two years without
developing any new bad sector.

I posted my experiment as I am sure there are a lot of DOS aficionados
using smaller disks and trying all sorts of things with hard disks, as
frequently seen in posts here and elsewhere.

Thanks for your comments

Sandy Archer

 

IMHO once I see bad blocks the disk gets yanked and replaced on any PC
that's being used for business purposes. Life't too short to have
unexpected total failures.

 

But you didn't do it with *this* drive, the one that you did the ex-
periment on.

Then either the drives didn't have bad sector management or they
had exhausted their spare sector pool already.

Yes, I read it the first time.

Yes, but your experiment doesn't count for anything if you don't finish it
an no hard conclusions can be drawn from it.

The 'fact' that you think that you never touched the areas that you took
out of use is no fact at all as drives heads patrol the surfaces in order
to not heat-up the heads and platters tracks when idle.