How to remove 30GB full of problems from hard drive?
 

Hi guys,

I have a problem with one HD. It’s a Maxtor 120GB.
I tried to run HDD Regenerator (great program btw, thanks Kwag!) to fix many bad clusters it has. Well, the test runs perfectly until it gets around 90GB. Them, from 90GB to 95GB, it found more than 8000 bad clusters and fixed about 1500. It took about 32 hours to go through 5GB… so I stopped the test and decided to use just the 90GB from the beginning of the disk.

Now here is my question… Is there a way to use this disk and completely discard the so many bad clusters at the last 30GB?
Is there a way to guarantee that a partition of 90GB in this disk will be done in the beginning of the disk? Leaving this way the 30 last problematic GBs out of the partition?

Thanks a lot! :D

Hi Ademar,

The new hard drives in the market to automatic bad sector re-allocation at the hardware level.
So I would have left HDD Regenerator run until it finished, and then proceed to format the drive as usual.
This way, the bad sectors are automatically flagged bad, and the ones that are good are the ones that will be useable.
So if HDD regenerator got stuck at around 90GB, restart it again with the option to continue at that point, and let it finish.
It WILL restore many bad sectors ;)

-kwag

Yes kwag... I guess you are right.
I'll let HDD Regenerator do its job. :D
But I was wondering if leaving the HD heads working so much time without rest would damage the HD... :?:

Yes... I know that!
I have another HD with 2500 bad sectors and it perfectly restored them ALL! 8)
It's a great program!!

I'd say that if you start seeing the bad sectors, you should just buy a new HD, or RMA the old one if possible. It won't take long till you get more of the baddies.

+1

Yeah, I know what you mean, but this is a new HD and I already got a new one from my supplier because of this problem, but for some reason he didn't ask for this one back, so I thought using it... well, the "usable" part of it at least.

It's just that the usable part will soon be overtaken by the bad sectors, which makes it practically unusable. The modern day HDs will soon fail after you've seen the first bad sectors appear as the extra space available for bad sector compensation has been used completely.

If you want to fiddle with the HD, I suggest you check what SpinRite tells you.

Spinrite is the reference, but HDD Regenerator does basically the same :)
I've had better luck lately with HDD Regenerator than with Spinrite.
I used to use Spinrite since the days of DOS, and now they have a version that will scan any hard disk, no matter what OS.
But HDD Reg. does the same too, and I think it's a little faster.

-kwag

Ok!
Thank you all! :)

This is because he knows that there is nothing to do with such a disc.

Hummmm... Could be, but I think that was not the reason.
There is at least one thing that he could do... that is returning it to the manufacturer. :wink:

Anyway... I'll take a risk and see what happen. :)

That is the manufacturer that don't want to have such return. To avoid to manage the recycle process !
I used to work for HP and when a custumer had a keyboard problem on a new PC, HP just sent him a new keyboard and never asked for the defect one to be returned.

Hmm, I need a new HD soon. Maybe I should just start the RMA process and see if Western Digital or Maxtor want the old one back?

:twisted: