Possible to repair bad sectors on old hard disk?

livEwirE

Hey guys,

I've a couple of old laptop hard disks I'm testing. Disk Sentinal is reporting bad sectors on the drives. Should I dump these drives or is it possible to repair them I have a mate who is interested in the 3 drives but I don't want to sell them to him if they are knackered.

All help appreciated:D

MunsterCycling

General rule of thumb is Bad sector = dump disc

Einstein

Actually, is it possible to recover data from bad sectors?

Saruman

Write zeros to the drives. If a zero can not be written to a sector, get rid of the drive.
A bad sector can just be corruption so a wipe can sometimes fix.

Usually just replace the drive.
If it makes odd noises, don't even bother trying to fix.

livEwirE

Cheers lads, the general opinion seems to be dump the drives as bad sectors are bad news. No dig deal, I wouldn't want a mate coming back to me after losing his data, thats for sure:eek:

RDM_83 again

Going to hijack this thread a bit, does anybody have any advice for this situation.

Got an old Iqon desktop recently and planned to turn it into xp (which was already loaded) and a linux distro dual boot.
The hard drive shown was named partion1
Basically due to a massive amount of malware and my incompetence (turning off system restore at a stage to soon). Pc no longer booted to windows xp.
Tried to reinstal xp, xp picked up hard drive fine (with two partions the first what i presume was the windows system resume partion ~2gigs and second the main 55gig ntfs partion)
XP didn't install (due to bad cd)
Decided I might as well set up setup linux on it and arrange the hard drive for when I get windows xp again at a later stage.
Booted puppyLinux live cd
Ran it, mounted the both the SDA1 (small) and SDA2 (large ntfs) fine.
Ran GParted
GParted was showing the small partition with an locked symbol at this stage
Decided would create new partition map and create new partitions (which would format the drive)
Did this, got an error message saying operations could not be completed (occured after 2 seconds).
As drive had no valuable data on it wasn't bothered.
Now however (including after reloading live cd)
GParted shows none of the partitions, instead single entry (grey) with full hard drive size, however it says file system can not be determined, and any time I try and format it fails due to error.
Used the broken windows xp disk to check and failing at much earlier stage.

Sorry for exceedingly long post (late nite rambling and frustration) but could you
recommend

a simpler hard drive error checking live cd (MHDD looks too complex) to show me if the hard drive is too damaged for use (it ran xp fine but unreliebaly and slowly but presumed that was due to malware, now after this wondering about hard drive)

a fairly simple live cd with a good formatting tool on it.

bhickey

RDM_83 again wrote: »

a simpler hard drive error checking live cd (MHDD looks too complex) to show me if the hard drive is too damaged for use

Universal Boot CD has a whole load of hard disk stuff on it.