Any use of a heavily bad sectored mechanical HDD?
I have a 6 years old Hitachi 1 TB HDD which is heavily bad sectored. Most I/O operation of moderate size fails on it. Smaller single files like documents and photos are accessible though. Is there any use of the disk, or should I throw it away?
I've tried formatting the whole disk but it still behaves the same.
Amaro Seagate bad sector fail korse recently. Seatools DOS version dia naki bad sector temporarily thik kora jay. Ota try kore dekhbo.
হিতৈচী ? I believe they do have a HDD repairing software but cant recall the name.
omae wa mou shindeiru
Try low level formatting with any renowned software, it should help.
Can you recommend me any such software?Originally Posted by Fox Mulder
https://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?p=3
Will this work for non-WD HDD?
Ha sob gula tei kore amar samaung er dead ta te support disilo should do the same with other's i suppose
I am sorry to have to tell you this, but some of the stuff on YouTube are just full of BS. This video is one of them, specially under the circumstances the OP is in. Low level format is a last resort method, and I have got it to work to have extended the lifespan of hard drives (Maxtor Slim 40GB HDDs to be precise) from unusable to a good 5 more years without a single hitch that went on to serve PCs in Aarong's Elephant Road branch from 2007 to 2012.
Last edited by Fox Mulder; December 29th, 2017 at 16:24.
I am sorry to have to tell you this, but some of the stuff on YouTube are just full of BS. This video is one of them, specially under the circumstances the OP is in. Low level format is a last resort method, and I have got it to work to have extended the lifespan of hard drives (Maxtor Slim 40GB HDDs to be precise) from unusable to a good 5 more years without a single hitch that went on to serve PCs in Aarong's Elephant Road branch from 2007 to 2012.
If you have some time in hand, please watch the full video. It summaries what I wanted to say, especially around 06:12 and 7:12 minute time stamps. In short, for modern hard drives low level formatting does not do anything. Any result you can get from running low level format on a modern drive would be exactly same as if you ran a Full Format or a Zero Fill Erase on that drive.
But yes, zero fill erase is the first thing to do for bad sectors. @Sumit Pramanik had a WD Green drive with 500+ bad sector which is still running fine for 5+ years now after a zero fill. I had a 160gb hitachi recovered from bad sectors after zero fill, and there was a curious case of a bad memory chip on a samsung 500gb drive that would fill up with bad sectors over time, and then get completely fixed every time with zero fill.
I have watched that video long before you posted it here, and I don't see the point when I've got results?
Low Level Format isn't anything magical, and most software from 2002 and later actually says in the description that it's Zero fill? I don't see the point of this discussion?
There are plenty of methods that I have used over the years to have saved hundreds of hard drives, by partitioning off recurring bad sectors into an unpartitioned space, scanning the whole Hard Drive using MHDD, noting down just the problematic sectors, and using HDD Regenerator to just work on those sectors to make them work as good as new again, without formatting or losing any data at all? I actually worked for Appositech at Elephant Road, a shop situated right at the opposite of the (in?)famous WAKIA IT at a young age, I was only 17 years old at the time. I worked there for a whole year which kind of impacted my 1st year of intermediate studies negatively during the year of 2005, but by the time I left people there knew me for my ability to resurrect Hard Drives with bad sectors, which I presumed most of the times were due to bad ATA Cables, power outage, etc. and I was paid a generous sum for each Hard Drive I fixed.
How many Hard Drives have you fixed that actually refused to accept a Zero Fill? There is this gem of an ISO called Hiren's BOOT CD that has a bunch of older tools from many of the Hard Drive manufacturers, and there was one effective one in particular from Maxtor that was very slow at getting the formatting done, but once it managed to complete, 80% of the time you'd have a drive that worked as good as new. You think the OP's Hard Drive will be better off by Full Formatting through Windows? It couldn't be any further from the truth.
I'll just share one experience. The years is 2005, and there was a strict rule about closing the markets at 8 pm and at about 7:45 PM on the clock, a man walked in with a Hard Drive asking me for help. It was a 40 GB Maxtor Slim SATA, and he says that his hard drive has important data on his E drive, the only issue is that his OS has suddenly barred access to that partition and says it's not formatted anymore, and he really needs the data? He got a quote from a nearby Data Recovery firm that asked about 5,000/- for a full data recovery of just the drive, and by the time he was done telling me his story, it was 7:51 PM on the clock, just 9~12 minutes away from the electricity switch off from the building's maintenance, and this guy had to submit whatever data by tomorrow 8 am.
I immediately understood what his problem is. The very first cluster of his Drive E fell into a bad sector, whether it was a cross linked sector, I have no clue. What I did was, I had a quick look at his partition size, then started a scan with MHDD from the end sector of his D Drive, and scanned till the end of his E drive, defined by the sector/cluster numbers. Just as I expected, it found about five cluster worth bad sectors, which I then used HDD Regenerator to make accessible again. By the time this was done, it was 7:59 PM on the clock, and then when it came to payment, he showed his true colors, and decided to bargain and only left with just two 100 Taka notes, disappointing to say the least as I literally saved him that night, but alas.. that's what you get for helping the needy.
Last edited by Fox Mulder; December 30th, 2017 at 23:58.
Lemme make something for those folks with no time:
TL;DR This thread is heating up.
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