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April 28th, 2004, 02:35 PM
#1
Bad Sectors on HDD
Can anyone recommend a free Utility to deal with bad sectors on my hard drive. The drive is stable but I would like to get rid of the intermittent slow downs.
Thanks.
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April 28th, 2004, 05:55 PM
#2
Tip: Since all hard drives are mechnical, they all *-will-* eventually fail.
A growing number of bad sectors indicates impending doom. If this is happening with your hard drive, you really need to backup any critical data immediately before the hard drive fails.
Free
The Windows program SCANDISK, set to "Thorough" will mark any bad sectors unusable so that data does not get written to them. To launch SCANDISK, click Start|Run, type in scandisk and press [Enter]. (Note that with the "Thorough" option selected it can take quite a while for it to do its job. Exactly how long depends on the size of the partition, the number of bad sectors and the speed of your computer and hard drive).
Not Free
A well-known program that can, in many cases, retrieve your data from and then attempt to repair bad sectors, (or mark them as bad), is SpinRite. But, at $89.00 it's more than most new hard drives today. (It does work though. I've used it many times over the span of many years). Note: SpinRite only works with FAT partitions, (which you have), and not NTFS (like on XP).
Another program that claims to be able to much the same, (on both FAT and NTFS partitions), is HDD Regenerator. But, it also is not free ($38.75) and until today I've never heard of it. (Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't work. )
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April 28th, 2004, 06:53 PM
#3
Just download your disk drive manufacturer's diagnostic software and run that to verify the state of your drive.
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April 28th, 2004, 07:51 PM
#4
Good idea Zedy. (Should've thought of it; use them frequently).
For example:
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