Storage Solutions Change the geometry of HDD - help needed

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CA50

CA50

Forerunner
I have a WD black 2.5" HDD (WDC WD3200BEKT-60KA9T0) giving SMART error. This drive was taken out from my friends laptop.

Since this is an OEM drive it has no warranty, so its for me to experiment :P

Now i have checked the HDD and its current geometry is

Cylinders : 620181

Heads : 16

Sectors per Track : 63

LBA : 625142448 .

The problem with the HDD is that it has lots of bad sector in its first part it between sector 1-19000000, so i can use the later part of the HDD (somewhat 100-150GB).

Now can i change the geometry of the HDD so that it excluded the former bad sectors and read the HDD from sector : 190000001

Also any way to disable SMART?

TIA :)
 
Want to know answer to the same. Got a 80GB 2.5" hitachi deskstar HDD from a friend for 200 bucks, from his old crumbling lappy. There were ~10 or so bad sectors and it was a good deal for experimenting with transmission on my asus router. Got a USB SATA case for 200 bucks from lammy.

My method:

Made a partition with the all bad sectors in it and made it into a RAW partition~10GB. Created 2 partition for the remaining, and they worked fine.

The only problem now is that i cannot use the entire HDD for transmission as its uses 2 partitions, /opt ~ 1GB and /mnt ~ 38GB. Have around 25GB free @ end which i cannot use!

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Do a low level format, ought ta work.
 
@vivek.krishnan why are you creating a raw partition just to hide the bad sector areas? Create one partition only, STARTING after the bad sector area and ENDING before say any bad areas near the end. Use any graphical partitioning software to make it easier. These days i'm using MiniTool Partition Wizard.

@CA50 similar method for you too.

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@vivek.krishnan just reread, didn't quite understand the problem. Is the 10gb raw partition the problem or something else? please clarify

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@CA50 does the bad sector area starting right at the beginning mean you have problems with the partition table and/or mbr?
 
@Julian, thanks i will try that out. BTW the bad sectors are at the beginning of the drive between sectors 1-19000000. I can create a partition after that. BUt is there any toot to permanently change its geometry so that it detects 19000001 as sector 0
 
Not that i'm aware of, and from my experience working with data recovery people, i don't think you can just get windows software which will do that. But then again, anything's possible, google...

If you're able to create and modify partitions without trouble, just create a partition(s) around the bad areas and it should work for a while at least. I once made about 7 partitions on an 80gb drive because i needed temporary space. the bad areas were all over so there were a lot of gaps in between. worked pretty well too, none of the clean partitions developed any further bad sectors in the 2 weeks i used the drive.
 
^ yep using the drive like that, but i was looking for a permanent solution :P

BTW what program did you use to make those partitions, the one i am using allows to adjust partition based on cylinder and not on sectors, anything that can adjust based on sectors will be more helpful and accurate:P
 
I used to use partition magic, now minitool partition wizard. I'm not aware of any dos/windows programs that will partition by sector, but i'm sure the command-line based linux utils can do it. there's something in 7 too, diskpart is it? that might be able to do the same.
 
Uh, actually, there is no problem really. Am planning to run spinrite on the drive soon, it should remap the sectors soon.
 
After checking the sectors in the HDD i found that sectors >190000000 are perfect, so i created a partition using MiniTool Partition Wizard, and made a partition of 180GB at the rear of the HDD i.e, after sector 190000000.

But still the drive is not performing well. First 1Gb data transfers at 13Mbps even though i have directly connected to via SATA cable and after 1.5GB data transfer, the speed drops to kbps and my system, lags :(

Any suggestion friends, also windows keeps reporting that the drive is faulty and failure is expected, i know that and i want to stop SMART reporting on that drive, any idea ?
 
You can turn off smart in the bios, but it's probably right and the drive is probably gonna die soon. doesn't seem like just a few bad sectors. esp since most are at the start of the drive, where the partition and media info is stored. whatever you do, don't store anything important on it.

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if you check your drive health info like in hd tune, you will probably see increasing stats for the reallocated sector count. also look at all the error rate stats, if you see them increasing steadily (refresh now and then) then you know that the drive is failing.
 
^ yep i know that drive is standing on one leg :P, but i am not going to leave it untill the last leg snaps :P

BTW can't disable smart in bios as i have other working HDD in my system, just want to disable smart in the HDD itself, maybe with some powerful dos program. About data storage, its just for time-pass for experiment purpose, if it works, then i will use it for transferring games and movies to my friends :) nothing important
 
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