Avoiding sections of the harddrive surface

[His Divine Shadow]

There appears to be on the surface of my Harddrive areas that are bad. This causes some data to be corrupted, like say parts of movies. Sometimes the program crashes or grinds to a halt because of things like this.

In the old days I had the same problem on an old HD but I fixed that by doing a sectorscan with scandisk and marking the bad sectors as off-limits.
Scandisk isn't compatible with NTFS and last time I used it it broke the system somehow.

My question is if there are any modern disk utilities that can scan the surface of a harddrive and mark them as bad?

[Netko]

Use CHKDSK, it serves the same function as scandisk used to. For the more invasive scans (like your's is likely to be) it sets up the scan but does it on next boot of the computer.

[His Divine Shadow]

whops

[Vertigo1]

Get what data you can off of that drive NOW! If you're finding bad sectors, then its a damn good chance that your drive is dying. You MIGHT be able to revive it with a low level format (which wipes the drive to factory settings by writing zeros to the entire drive), but I wouldn't put much faith in it afterward.

[His Divine Shadow]

Get what data you can off of that drive NOW! If you're finding bad sectors, then its a damn good chance that your drive is dying. You MIGHT be able to revive it with a low level format (which wipes the drive to factory settings by writing zeros to the entire drive), but I wouldn't put much faith in it afterward.

Well it's been kind of fucked since last june, I did low-level format it once. It's not a primary drive and I only use it to move stuff between two computers. So I'm going it use it until it fails and then I'll just get a new one. I'm going to use it until it can no longer function sans zombification.

[BloodAngel]

CheckDisk doesn't tell the hard disk to avoid these surfaces. I did a scan on my other external hard drive the other day and it supposedly "marked" these bad sectors; turns out that when I tried to copy something onto the drive, it managed to hit those sectors anyway and freeze. I did another CheckDisk and no new bad sectors were discovered.

Strange, yes...

[Stark]

Modern HDD firmware is constantly detecting and blocking bad sectors of the physical disk. By the time you're actually detecting bad sectors logically (ie, in Windows), it means your drive is totally fucked and will catastrophically fail soon.

[His Divine Shadow]

Modern HDD firmware is constantly detecting and blocking bad sectors of the physical disk. By the time you're actually detecting bad sectors logically (ie, in Windows), it means your drive is totally fucked and will catastrophically fail soon.

Which was last year

[Stark]

So don't fucking whinge when it fails and you lose everything. The integral ability of the drive to absorb failures is exhausted: eventually something important will be lost, and we'll all laugh that you were too cheap to blow $100 on a new, bigger, better drive.

[His Divine Shadow]

So don't fucking whinge when it fails and you lose everything. The integral ability of the drive to absorb failures is exhausted: eventually something important will be lost, and we'll all laugh that you were too cheap to blow $100 on a new, bigger, better drive.

Oh shut up and read the thread before you post crap like this.

It's not a primary drive and I only use it to move stuff between two computers.

As I've said I don't have anything important on it and nothing will be lost when it fails, at most it'll be a minor inconvinience. But hey lets ignore that assholish rant and lets pretend you actually knew anything about the situation you where speaking of like some self proclaimed expert

[Stark]

Hilarous. OP = 'My HDD is brokzor, what can I do?'

Everyone = 'Get your data off, drive is fucked!'

You = 'LOLZ rubes it is teh win.'

Me = 'What the fuck are you whining about then you moron.'

Sorry, you complained about your drive problem, everyone told you the same thing. You don't care? Whatever. Don't come crying to us.

[His Divine Shadow]

Hilarous. OP = 'My HDD is brokzor, what can I do?'

Everyone = 'Get your data off, drive is fucked!'

You = 'LOLZ rubes it is teh win.'

Me = 'What the fuck are you whining about then you moron.'

Sorry, you complained about your drive problem, everyone told you the same thing. You don't care? Whatever. Don't come crying to us.

Yes hilarious. First you get all bitchy because you didn't bother reading the thread and then you bitch even more when called on it. Absofuckinglutely hilarious indeed

Lets try another recap:

Me = "My HDD has bad sectors, what can I do to mark them as off limits?"

mmar = *offers an alternative*

vertigo1 = *informs me that the HDD is likely to fail*

Me = *replies that I know that and that because of that its used only as a sort of improvised floppy disk but I want to use it as long as possible anyway*

Bloodangel = *divulges information regarding chkdsk*

You = *talks about how my HDD is likely to die very soon*

Me= *replies how it was like this a year ago already, funny how long it's lasted huh?*

You = *explodes* Bitch bitch bitch!



But hey thanks for the info, your contribution was quite usefull up until the point you blew up.

P.S. what is this 'us' you are talking about? You're only one person and the only one who has had a bug up his ass in this thread.