Dead sectors on main HDD

[Bazzlad]

And shock horror, it's a Seagate.

Anyone recommend good recovery/fixing tools.
(I remember one program would flag the bad sectors and allow the drive to be used as normal - can't remember the name though!)

HELP!

[Saracen]

I would say a lot depends on what is reporting dead sectors. You can use chkdsk /f or Norton Scandisk, but depending on circumstances, my primary concern would be why there were bad sectors. Are they low-level read errors that may indicate a physical disk problem, or are they file system errors?

If they're physical, then ..... why are you getting physical errors? Most (if not all) reasonably modern drives should have automatic error correction and defect-mapping built-in. But, if the list of defects is growing, then why? It could be indicative of hard problems, like head crashes. If so, then if it's a new drive it needs replacing and if it's an old older drive, then you have to worry if using it is going to lead to increasing problems and either incremental data loss or even catastrophic failure. So, if the contents are actually important, do you want to risk that?

The next suggestion is perhaps a bit more contentious, because a lot of people seem to dislike it/him, but I've had good results with Steve Gibson's Spinrite.

[Bazzlad]

Just tried spinrite - it couldn't actually do anything (The bad sector(s) starts at 0)

New drive time methinks....

[Saracen]

....

New drive time methinks....

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree.

I suppose if it's a drive that doesn't contain anything important (like maybe a music collection that you have archived to DVD anyway) you may decide to risk it, but if it's anything you can't afford to lose, or would be inconvenient to restore/rebuild, then yeah. Drives (or at least, most drives) are pretty cheap these days and I'd probably not want to risk the hassle of a failure at an inconvenient moment, let alone the hassle and time involved in sorting it out.