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I have an out of warranty laptop that has an hdd with bad sectors. I say that because chkdsk /r
got stuck for over 24 hours at certain %. I also left GRC's SpinRite
running for 4 days. It is my understanding that these programs get stuck at certain places because they try to recover as much data as possible. I'm not interested in that. All important data have already been backed up. I'm looking for a solution where I can continue using this hdd and avoid buying a new one. I take full consequences of using a failing drive.
I'm looking for some tool that preferably non-destructively(to preserve current Windows/apps installs) would do something along the lines of:
if it can't read/write to a sector 3 times, mark it bad and move on.
I don't need programs to grind for hours/days at a time to recover as much data as possible. I'm looking for something to specifically quickly mark bad sectors.
Note that running SpinRite on Level 1 will not mark bad sectors. Level 1 just does a passive scan and makes NO changes to the drive. If you want to have SpinRite mark bad sectors, run it on level 2 or above. The reason Level 1 is faster is because it simply just does a read and nothing else. – None – 2014-07-25T15:18:12.187
@TechJKL running it at Level 2 would make SpinRite try to recover data/repair drive. That is something I didn't want to do. And if it got stuck for 4+ days on Level 1, Level 2+ would've taken even longer. – Mxx – 2014-07-25T18:09:53.333
If a Level 1 SpinRite scan does less than what you're asking for by only detecting bad sectors but not attempting any recovery or marking them bad, then it's very likely that doing that plus marking it bad will take at least as long. It seems like all or a good portion of your drive is shot past whatever percentage it gets to. I was in a similar boat once and my temporary fix until I was able to get a new drive was to repartition and full format the drive about up to the point where the failures started, leaving the rest unallocated, then installing the OS. I hope this helps someone. – Starson Hochschild – 2014-09-25T01:09:30.810
@StarsonHochschild your assumption that the rest of the drive was bad is incorrect. There were only 2 specific bad spots on the drive. the rest was fine. – Mxx – 2014-09-25T05:03:39.487
You can partition around the bad spots. It's not ideal, but should work giving you two or three usable partitions. – Starson Hochschild – 2014-09-25T05:10:17.837
@StarsonHochschild That's not what my question was about. – Mxx – 2014-09-25T13:11:08.233
1That's why I didn't post those as answers ;) – Starson Hochschild – 2014-09-25T13:26:35.997
I suggest you assess your power supply to make sure that it is providing clean and good power. I had a laptop that was giving me problems about the hard disk until I replaced the power supply brick. – Richard Chambers – 2017-10-04T20:54:04.213
Have you tried
hiren boot cd
. It has many options that can help you. – Ankur140290 – 2014-01-09T11:03:07.763@Ankur140290 yup, it is my go-to platform. Alas it doesn't have tools for this specific task. – Mxx – 2014-01-09T15:43:19.423
When you ran SpinRite did you do it at level 1? – Scott Chamberlain – 2014-01-09T22:08:21.537
@ScottChamberlain yes, I ran it at lvl1 – Mxx – 2014-01-09T22:10:43.803
Much of this behavior is in the "smart" drive itself, and not the CPU-side software. Hence only a drive-specific utility will have any effect. – Daniel R Hicks – 2014-01-10T12:20:20.750