Question: I have an out of warranty laptop that has an hdd with bad sectors. I say that because ?chkdsk /r got stuck for over 24 hours at certain %. I also left GRC’s SpinRite running for 4 days. It is my understanding that these programs get stuck at certain places because they try to recover as much data as possible. I’m not interested in that. All important data have already been backed up. I’m looking for a solution where I can continue using this hdd and avoid buying a new one. I take full consequences of using a failing drive.
I’m looking for some tool that preferably non-destructively(to preserve current Windows/apps installs) would do something along the lines of:
if it can’t read/write to a sector 3 times, mark it bad and move on.
I don’t need programs to grind for hours/days at a time to recover as much data as possible. I’m looking for something to specifically quickly mark bad sectors.
Answer: After some deep digging, Easeus Partition Manager Home Edition has a feature called Disk Surface Test, which apparently reads the blocks off a drive and spots and marks the bad sectors, and based on what I’ve found so far, it makes no attempt to recover those blocks. More information on this page about the software’s disk surface test: http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/disk-surface-test.htm and here for download link: http://www.partition-tool.com/landing/home-download.htm (big green button at bottom of page).
Specifically, it says on the disk surface test page:
?
When it finds bad sectors, it will mark those sectors as bad with red color so that the system knows not to use them. It may allow them to be read, in case the data stored on the bad sector is still accessible, but they cannot be written to.
so I think this may just be what you’re looking for.