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Reply With QuoteHakko (30-08-09)
Bad sector errors on HDD - Fixed This is purely for any numbie like me who wasn't aware that this could be done.
Okay it was Saturday night and end of the month which means it maintenance time..... Woo hoo anyway I ran my Seatools for windows application and it failed the "short DST run" so I checked it with HD Tune and it said I had some bad sectors on the HDD. I did some googling and found this:
"Before you replace, I always like to try for a repair. Most hard disks actually have some spare sectors they set aside for exactly this purpose.
On Windows XP, I'd start with a "chkdsk/R". (/R: "Locates bad sectors and recovers readable information"). Fire up a Command Prompt to run that command. You can access Command Prompt by going to Start, Programs, Accessories, and then click on Command Prompt."
So I followed the instructions and the program ran 5 scans, all up took about 2 hours. I then retested the HDD and all sectors were repaired/restored/fixed.
Hope this may be useful for someone as I never knew XP had that facility. There are no doubt other ways to fix this issue but this was very easy as the software is already on your PC.
cheers
Hakko (30-08-09)
Thanks myf360f1, Might give this one a go myself after dayshift
I recently had a similar experience to that reported by myf360f1.
Some twelve months ago, one of my customers reported that a 300GB hard drive had become unreliable in operation, with numerous read errors.
I retrieved what data I could and then attempted to re-format the unit several times, but without success. I then replaced the drive for the client concerned.
A few weeks later, when I had some spare time, I decided once more to attempt to recover the drive.
It took numerous attempts at re-formatting, but eventually the drive was formatted successfully with no errors.
Soak testing the drive for 48 hours or so with a disk integrity/reliability program, which did successive random writes and reads, indicated that the drive was now useable.
I have been using the drive myself (to full capacity) for ten months or so now with no errors whatsoever.
I'm not saying that all hard disk drives can be recovered in this way, as in my experience, it is not always successful. I would never trust such a drive to store important or irreplaceable data on, but for unimportant, everyday use, it is worth trying.
XP HDD bad sector repairs. G'Day Cobbers,Originally Posted by myf360f1
I have my reservations about this being a panacea.
I have been playing with this for over a month now and found that the same segment errors were recurring.
What I seem to have found is that if you do a defragment, the same errors come back.
It's becoming increasingly obvious to me that the defragment program does not have access to the Marked Bad Sector list and just uses all segments available.
If true, it seems ridiculous that MS have not covered this possibility.
I will carry out further checks to confirm.
Kindest Regards, " The Druid ".
Hi Druid,
What your saying may be completely correct, although I hope thats not the case, but in my situation I only had a few bad sectors and by doing that chkdsk it resolved my issue. I have retested twice using some other progs and it seems to be all clear.
As a side note I also tried Seagates DOS version of their HDD repair facility but I couldn't get it to work.
I know there are better programs specifically designed to fix these problems but I kinda like that MS has built one into XP.
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