Software to deal with bad sectors?

M@crosoft

M@crosoft

The Weather Man !
Level E
hey mates,

the heading says it all:huh:

i have a pc with damn cracker of a UPS ..

the silly power cuts, day and night have really taken my sleep away and forced

me to think about the bad sectors which may develop in my seagate barcuda

500gb 7200.11:(

can't change the UPS for 1mnth or so(don't ask for reasons ...consider it as financial crisis:P)

thanks in advance:ohyeah:
 
No. Windows and many other disk checkers do not prevent bad sectors. When bad sectors are detected by chkdsk (for instance) will mark those bad sectors as unusable so as to prevent data writing on to them.

On the other end, hdd regenerator acts quite different, it detects real bad sectors(also marked by other disk tools like chkdsk...) and correct them by using some algorithms which will renders the bad sectors to be usable again.
 
M@crosoft said:
can merely checking the HDD through various softwares or WINDOWS inbuilt chkdsk prevent bad sectors?
Click to expand...
No HDD tool in the world will be able to repair bad sectors. They will only re-allocate them and mark them as unusable so as to prevent data from being written on them (and as such potentially getting lost).

Think about it, how would a software be able to repair physical errors in your hardware? That is what bad sectors are.

If OP is planning to keep using his HDD in such unstable conditions under the hopes that any bad sectors will get magically repaired by some software, it's not going to happen.

Just get a reliable UPS asap! (Or move to Ahmedabad :))
 
I haven't experienced any HDD misbehavior so far ...it's just that i was reading about bad

sectors and found my HDD eligible to create a bad sector in it!

it's not about loosing 20-30mb data or reformatting....but i suppose their is a risk of

hard disk crash?

and 7200.11s are champs in crashing!

the restart which my computer suffers is about 2 times in 4 days.....enough to worry?

Think about it, how would a software be able to repair physical errors in your hardware? That is what bad sectors are.
Click to expand...

so bad sectors already present are untreatable?
 
^ Yes, bad sectors are untreatable. HDD tools will merely reallocate said bad sectors and mark them unusable and reallocate a good sector (from the surplus cache that most HDDs keep stashed away) to replace it.

Your usable space won't go down unless the amount of bad sectors go beyond the amount of surplus good sectors.
 
Replace the HDD once the bad sectors develop. It happens when the head crash lands on the disk surface. More likely to happen when shaking a working disk rather then power failure. The Head are pulled to safe landing zone incase of power failure.

Normally the head is flying above the surface of disk running at high speeds. This gap between the head and Disk is very less and even a dust particle can be like a major accident. But once the surface is damaged and a small particle gets loose from the disk surface, it behaves like dust. You get bad sectors whenever it comes between the head and the disk surface.

Check the link HowStuffWorks "What does it mean when a hard disk has a "head crash"?"

Take backup and use warranty!
 
Use SMART Status Monitoring Software to check your HDD every 30 mins or so. In case you get a bad sector, such tools will prompt you right away.

If you have a bad sector, do understand that it is a physical defect. This cannot be fixed. What "fixing" tools do is re-map the logical sector number to a spare physical sector which is not currently used/ mapped for the file system. Every HDD has a number of spare sectors for this purpose. This is commonly referred to as "fixing" a bad sector.
 
HDD regenerator rectifies the logical bad sectors but not a physical bad sector. The site says that it can repair physical bad sector too (then is it performing any miracle by replacing the magnetic disk ?? :bleh:)

If you havent dropped your hdd or if you are very sure you havent caused any physical damage to it (like shaking your pc, etc ) then most probably it is a logical error only.

i have used HDD regenerator long back and it fixed a bad sector in my hdd ( dont know if its logical or physical). After that i re-partitioned the hdd and found no bad sectors. So HDD regenerator can do the job . But if its a physical bad sector i think even if HDD reg might show that it has fixed the bad sector, after formatting or re-partitioning the bad sector will show up.

But i am not using the hdd which i fixed with HR. After sometime due to much anticipation i RMAed it .

So first try HR, and then delete all the paritions and re-parition and format your HDD then use HD Tune (i recommend) . HD tune is very fast and i feel its pretty ok. With this you can come to a conclusion the HDD is rectified. But if you are not confident with HR then RMA it.

@axeman - So how to identify if a bad sector is physical or logical ?
 
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