HDD bad sectors and re-formating to solve the issue...ish..

[razer121]

Anyone have any idea how easy it would be? following on from this thread...
http://forums.hexus.net/help-quick-r...ck-up-hdd.html

I now unfortunately have a half working half not working samsung spinpoint f3 500gb but after doing some research and lots of check disk and hd tune....i found that most of the bad sectors are at the start of the hdd (first 80gb o.O

It sucks as the drive was such a reliable drive only yesterday but basically i want to try format the hdd so i can leave the area of bad sectors as "raw" or "unallocated" format and use the good part of the drive..

[stilkun]

You can use partition software to create partition containing bad sector then hide it. Then create normal partitions for other remaining spaces. That way Windows will not write near the bad sectors.

If you are comfortable with command line in Windows then use DsikPart command to create the partition. If you are not familiar, not sure which partition GUI software to recommend as I have rarely mess around with partition, maybe gparted?

[Thorsson]

I wouldn't use it myself. Chances are it will degrade further.

[GoNz0]

drives dying, give up wasting time on it.

80gb of bad sectors today, 160gb tomorrow...

[Konstantin1]

Yea, once a hard drive starts to go it's time to back up your data (if you're lucky enough to still have that option) and say goodbye.

[Steve]

The drive will have started to re-map bad sectors - this is normal behaviour in a hard drive. However, if you have a huge chunk of unusable disk, then the reserved area for re-maps will be fully utilised and your're SOL if you get any bad sectors anywhere else.

Drop that drive like it's hot; at worst it's about to die completely, and at best the performance will drop off a cliff edge.

[ty2010]

The drive will have started to re-map bad sectors - this is normal behaviour in a hard drive. However, if you have a huge chunk of unusable disk, then the reserved area for re-maps will be fully utilised and your're SOL if you get any bad sectors anywhere else.

Drop that drive like it's hot; at worst it's about to die completely, and at best the performance will drop off a cliff edge.

Samsung has a nice utility for changing the default drive size and moving the mapped useable space. I've been using a "failed" 2tb for 3 years now without trouble after I whacked 100GB off the end for spares and mapped around 20GB of failing clusters in the middle.

Additional sources of trouble besides the drive failing -

Did you add/remove a drive recently?

Many Samsungs require the speed set with the boot utility. Some controllers will set the speed to SATA1 if two drives are on a split channel but goes to SATA 2-3 with single drives. 2-3 will be enabled because the Samsung reports it's capable even if set to SATA1.

There are also mode considerations. There are other chipsets that have this problem, but the ones I have experience with are the ICH5s. Plug two sata drive in and you're fine because both channels are automatically limited to ATA5, single however, you must manually set the speed to ata5 or it will let the drive set the speed to ata6 or 7 which the chipset doesn't support. Similar can happen on multi channels if the drive shares a port with a slower drive or dvd, remove the second drive and the port speed or drive speed are bumped up and will not communicate reliably.

Next is the bios, did you click anything to restore defaults?

Newer boards enable sata spread spectrum by default, many drives require a jumper or to run a dos configuration utility to turn the spread spectrum on and off. To make matters worse, there's many methods of implementing spread spectrum and they can be incompatible.

There's also consideration of hard disk predelay, 3 seconds is usually enough to catch the slow posters. If you have a lot of drives you may have to go with a staggered start or larger power supply, particularly if you added fans, a higher power graphics card, new USB items or recently overclocked.

There's also the usual suspects: bad cables, enabling raid, driver upgrades, DMA settings, power settings, virus (if you're going strictly by windows utilities), bad OC settings, flaking board or power supply, etc.