Can anyone recommend a good tool for repairing bad sectors on a hard drive?
I have a 1 TB disk, it seems to work o.k. but it has a number of bad sectors. It passes all the other SMART tests.
I have a tool running (HDD regenerator) that is working slowly. In the last 50 minutes it has scanned 2 million sectors, and found and repaired 12 bad ones. There are 1953 million sectors in total to scan. The tool estimates that it will finish in 760 hours.
Anything faster than this, please?
Bad sectors are often a sign that the drive is about to totally fail, so I wouldn’t rely on storing important data on it or using it as a system drive, even if you find a software that can do the job in a reasonable time.
Seeing as repairing bad sectors basically means trying really hard to read the data off of them, and then marking them bad, you’re really not impeded by the software but the speed of the drive.
Honestly, if you’ve got sufficient backups, I’d just reformat. If you don’t enable the quick format option, it will mark all bad sectors as bad, and will be much quicker than trying to read the bad sectors.
And it may not be able to read them correctly anyways.
I don’t have an answer to your question but why do you want to repair physically failed sectors? If you have a rate of 6 per million, that’s 0.0006%, or around 6M on your 1T drive. That’s what, a couple of MP3 songs?
Are you trying to restore lost data, or just striving for perfection?
I also don’t know how this tool you’re using is repairing sectors but keep in mind that these might be physical failures. I would not even try to repair that without knowing the cause or the risk of the same sector failing again.
Just striving for perfection. I want to sell it, and make sure there are no faults before I do. There’s no data on it that I want to keep, just some files I copied there to test it’s working. I already reformatted it.
edit - when I formatted, I did quick format. You think that formatting without quick will remove the bad sectors?
Yes, like BigT said, a regular format includes a physical check for bad sectors which are excluded from further use after formatting. The usable size of the drive will be of course reduced according to the amount of bad sectors. But as I said before, I wouldn’t count on the reliability of an already physical damaged drive, and it would be only fair to disclose this information to a potential buyer.
CHKDSK should also mark the bad sectors and keep future writing to it.
FYI, modern drives have a number of sectors in reserve for when bad sectors develop, which they will remap internally by themselves. This process is not disclosed to the operating system. By the time bad sectors show up at the OS level, the drive is in really bad shape. I’m very surprised there’s no SMART failures.
Toss it. That drive is junk and any buyer would be justified to demand a refund.
i would use such a drive for non-crucial data. you can’t tell how long it will last. i would let anyone know who i sold or gave the drive to of that fact.
First, with the new drives, there is no such thing as low level formatting, save with SCSI drives. The manufacturer’s “low level format utility” is simply a zero fill utility that writes zeroes to every sector.
Low level formatting is performed at the factory with equipment that is beyond impractical for an affordable hard drive.
If you’re seeing bad sectors now, it’s on its way south. See if it’s in warranty, if it is, they’ll replace it. If not, drives aren’t that expensive now, a 1TB drive is only $50-60 in SATA in 3.5 inch form factor.
Just replaced my half TB in my Macbook Pro, as the old one had bad sectors after a head crash. I picked up a $60.00 7200 RPM half TB drive at Microcenter, then restored from backup.
If the drive is out of warranty the tool you need is the garbage can. A drive with bad sectors is on the way downhill. Tools to deal with bad sectors are mainly intended for data recovery they do not make the drive “good”. More bad sectors will inevitably appear before too long. Selling a drive with known bad sectors to anyone is tantamount to fraud.
I wouldn’t throw it out, I’d make it an extra drive for stuff that isn’t too important. I have had a bad drive with bad sectors since 2008. I have it in an external case. I use it as a back up of a back up. I run chkdisk on it and it takes care of the bad sectors. Which haven’t really gotten any worse since 2008.
I wouldn’t use a drive as primary but it doesn’t need to be tossed. I have my files a back up and a second back up to this drive. Because I don’t feel like ripping my movies and CDs again
Bad sectors are not faults, in the sense that anyone would or should have an expectation that a drive has none of them. I used to work on drives of 10-15mb and they routinely had 6-12 bad sectors on them. Having that many in a 2tb drive is utterly trivial and not worth your time worrying about.
If anything has found a problem with a sector, you don’t want to “repair it”, ie to flag it as usable. All you are doing is imperilling data, for the sake of 512 bytes of space.
Everyone should have an expecation of zero user-visible faults. The diagnostic equipment at the factory will map out any defective sectors. Thus, any bad sectors that the user sees are “grown” faults. Either there’s some physical damage to the media (in which case the number of faults will likely increase over time) or there was a glitch during the writing of a sector (such as a power failure) which corrupted the on-disk format.
If a drive detects a bad sector on a write, it will re-allocate the sector to one kept in reserve. If the defect is detected on a read, the drive will use a number of internal methods to try to correct the data. If the error is uncorrectable, it will be reported to the operating system. A correctable error will also be reported via one of a number of different mechanisms, but a user-space program won’t see those reports unless it goes looking for them.
Any software tool that claims to “repair” bad sectors is (at best) trying to force the drive to reallocate the sector. The drive’s internal hardware / software has far more sophisticated error recovery available to it than anything available at the operating system or application level.
In the old days, the operating system needed to map out bad sectors. DEC used standard #144 (BAD144), for example. Disks would come with labels on the case giving cylinder / head / bytes from index (or sector #) and users or service technicians could manually enter that data in an on-disk table.
However, once the processing of sector data moved onto the drive (as opposed to the drive just sending streams of data to the controller and letting the controller sort it out), drives became logically perfect (no bad sectors reported to the OS) even if the underlying physical media had defects. This happened nearly 30 years ago, in SASI. For some years after that, it was still possible to do a “real” field format of a disk drive, which would rewrite the tracks and possibly correct marginal sectors. However, physical formatting became unavailable due to a number of advances in hardware - initially, the wedge servo and later, zone bit recording - meant that a true format became more and more complex, until it was only possible to do it at the factory when the drive was manufactured.
I disagree. I don’t know of any drive manufacturer who will refuse a warranty RMA for even a single grown bad sector.
Background - I’ve worked with quite a few of the original ST-506 drive designers, written firmware for some of the first SASI controllers, and worked on the design of several disk drives. Here is a 20+ year old thread talking about (among a vast number of other things) old-time bad sector handling.
But wouldn’t zeroing out the drive still accomplish what we are talking about? It would force the entire drive to be written, thus forcing the system to automatically check each sector.
I know that, 10 years ago, marking sectors as bad took some amount of time, as the hard drive had to start looking at individual sectors rather than in large groups. So I would think that, when the system did eventually try to write to the bad sector, it would slow it down, and thus it would be nice to get that done ahead of time.
Technically maybe, but the drive has, lets say, spots A,B,C and D available, and is mapping them to physical sectors 1,2,3 and 4 (with 5,6 and 7 in reserve).
When sector 2 goes bad, B is changed to map to 5, and the OS is none the wiser. If sector 5 goes bad, and there’s no more in reserve, then the drive will be forced admit to the OS that sector B can’t be read.
At that point, there’s not actually just 1 bad sector (as the OS supposes), but 4. This is why people are saying the drive is junk.
Also, testing for bad sectors will only “affect” sectors 1,5,3 and 4.
Also also, I’m 99% certain that the bad sector info is written in to the NTFS metadata. What happens if the purchaser wants to use ext3, or FAT, or some other variant of NTFS, or heck, just wants to reformat it?
For the previous reasons, having any bad sectors detectable at the OS level in a modern drive is a 100% certain indication that the drive is worthless.
I’d be a little surprised if a terabyte drive was already out of warranty. They haven’t been around that long, have they?
Most OEM drives purchased at retail have 3 (some have 5) year warranties. If purchased as part of a system the drive warranty may (in some cases) be keyed to the system warranty which could be as little as one year. Hitachi introduced the first one terabyte drive in January 2007 or approx 4.5 years ago.
I repeat my statement that selling a modern drive with visible bad sectors is selling merchandise that is inherently defective.
Hey, I know this is an ancient thread but wanted to touch bases.
I’m an old timer too. First hard drive was an MFM 10mb Shugart on a Tandy Color Computer 2. This is while I was fixing Data General Diablo Series 30, 40 and the Zebra hard drives (and controllers). I even had a few experiences with a CDC MFM-80…scary beasts. Back when an 8" floppy drives were often single sided an had 156,000 bytes. You could use Magnaflux with a UV light and a magnifying glass to see the tracks and flux changes.
“I disagree. I don’t know of any drive manufacturer who will refuse a warranty RMA for even a single grown bad sector.”
I think you know this has changed since then. Most current hard drive manufacturers will not even issue an RMA unless you are able to run their diagnostic software and give them a fatal error code. Also, most big names have consumed each other in the early 2000’s feeding frenzy. Probably a good thing in the long run.
I run my system 24/7/365 and I suggest anyone using computers realize that most damage happens to the electronics when you power them on-off-on over and over again. Get a good UPS, one with serviceable batteries. The dangers of mechanical drive failures is fading by the roadside as SSD’s fall in price and soar in reliability. The new technology drives do not destroy themselves as you write to them, but beware, they actually have a warranty that can be pre empted by excessive writes. I find this kind of strange, but it’s a brave new world for data storage.