few bad sectors, any solutions?

[Trypt]

I have two 1.5TB WD drives, warranty void by now (tried, but over by at least 2-3 years). These two HDD's are in question for this post. I do have a SSD for the OS, a Raptor for games and a bunch of other big drives, including a 3TB external drive that I use for movies and it works still after all these years (knock on wood). Somehow the prices for these drives are not going down like they used to, I bought my 3TB external for less than $200, more than 4 years ago, and now the cheapest 3TB drive I can find is only half that price, ridiculous.

Anyhow, I have done a low level format and a chkdsk full check and both drives have bad sectors (the 1.5TB drives). One is a Green drive WD15EARS, the other is black/silver but also WD15EARS, probably from before the color coding that WD does now. The bad sectors however, they are under 1MB on one drive and under 2MB on the other, so tiny. Of course windows has put a block on them, and yes, I can put stuff on them, but after a while, even on the same day, the drive will hit the bad sector anyway, and slow down to Kbytes/second and won't allow a cancel (whether copying or watching), randomly. After this little crash and wait, the drive continues again but this repeats. Right now the drives are both formatted and empty, with chkdsk putting bad sectors in quarantine (lol)

So I figure it's toast but it occurs to me to do something, and want your opinion:

Originally I was going to ask if there is software out there that can map the drive for me and show me the sectors that are damaged, and then allow me to partition that part of the HDD off, not to be accessed at all (no letter) and assign a letter to the good part, whatever big I make it, whether 1.4TB or something smaller, just to keep the needle away from the bad sectors.

But then I came up with another way, which may be possible. How about I just do a half partition (fdisk or any other partitioning software), so 2x750GB, then do chkdsk and find out which half has the bad sectors, and the use the good half and assign it a letter. I figured since this is a half, a huge chunk of disk considering the tiny amount of bad sectors, the needle shouldn't go near the assigned visible partition. This way I would make two 750GB drives out of the two 1.5TBs, and even that is fine with me if it guarantees success.

But then I though, hey, why not continue this process, and then with the bad 750GB, half it again, and use the good half (375GB) and give that a letter, and put aside the bad 375GB. I could half it again to 185GB and maybe even again, and end up with 4 partitions per drive assigned letters, with the last 180GB or where ever I stop, not assigned, and containing the bad sectors.

Do you guys think that would do it? If not halfing all the way down to a few GB, then at least a 750GB and 375GB partitions with letters assigned, then the 375GB partition that has the few MB of bad sectors, leave it alone, not active at all, no letter, just empty non used partition, would that be ok? I'd be willing to give up 375GB per drive to do this if I could be 99.9% sure that those bad sectors will not bother me.

Any opinion on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Mr.Scott]

If you have bad sectors, the drive is bad. Period. Sure, you can buy time, but you're already on borrowed time before it self destructs.
There is no fix.
Back up your data.

 

[HankB]

I have a hard time disagreeing with Mr. Scott. Ordinarily the drive will remap bad sectors and hide them from the OS. If you're to the point where the OS is seeing bad sectors, then it seems that the drive has run out of spare sectors to remap.

In my case I used SMART monitoring to watch the remapped sector count grow to thousands (on a 2TB drive) before I replaced it. Even at that point the OS was otherwise unaware of any bad sectors.

 

[Mighty_Miro_WD]

Hey @Trypt!

That's an interesting plan to skip the bad sectors, but it will depend more or less on what type of bad sectors your drives have and many are they indeed. IMO, it will be best to backup all the important data and look for a replacement hard disk/s.

Basically there are two kinds of bad sectors, hardware and software. Hardware ones are caused by physical damage or becoming magnetically fixed, and they are unrepairable and nothing you can do could stop them grow in number. Software bad sectors on the other hand are when something called an Error Correction Code (ECC) doesn't match the contents of the hard drive, and these can be repaired. However, since you've tried low level format and full check with chkdsk, and bad sectors are still detected, I would guess that those you have are the first kind which is why a drive replacement is a preferable option here.

Hope this helps and feel free to ask any questions you may have.

Cheers!

 

[Trypt]

Hey, thanks to all the replies. Like I said, these HDD's didn't have important data, just movies and tv shows, sure, High Def stuff, some I wanted to keep forever, but am already in the process of replacing anyway.

I just wanted to see if I can maybe partition the drive in half and keep the internal arm from even coming close to the bad sectors, thus preventing further damage, like I said, bad sectors are 1MB in total space, on a 1.5TB drive, that is less than 1 millionth of the space available.

That being said, I am afraid that my two remaining big drives are on their last legs. All my docs/pics are on a 1TB drive that is even older than these, and it's on all the time for 6 years now, and constantly being used, also WD, but works perfectly still. Maybe it's the fact it's always on, never put to sleep, since it's always uploading/downloading 24/7. The 3TB external is 4 years old but it's seldom used, and I think these externals are meant to go to sleep a lot, and I only wake it up maybe a few times a week for a few hours to watch something, or at least a family member does from the LAN which I allow, when they can't find entertainment on my main drive.

I need a good drive that will keep my data, but can also take over the duties of my current 1TB drive (always on). I want to stick to WD because of their warranty replacement (advance replacement so that they send you a drive before you send yours back), I find that option awesome and have used it three times in the past. So, is the Red on the way to go (I cannot bring myself to pay double for the Black one, I just don't see the point). I always bought the cheapest one (Green) but now I have read they are meant as backup, to sleep and wake, whereas Red is for always on and network stuff, which is exactly what I use my drive for now. I don't even know what the Blue or Purple are for, or any other color.

Thank you.

 

[magellan]

I have a hard time disagreeing with Mr. Scott. Ordinarily the drive will remap bad sectors and hide them from the OS. If you're to the point where the OS is seeing bad sectors, then it seems that the drive has run out of spare sectors to remap.

In my case I used SMART monitoring to watch the remapped sector count grow to thousands (on a 2TB drive) before I replaced it. Even at that point the OS was otherwise unaware of any bad sectors.

Will HDD's automagically remap sectors to spare sectors (maybe during idle times)? Or do you have to run a utility program to make them do so?

 

[HankB]

Will HDD's automagically remap sectors to spare sectors (maybe during idle times)? Or do you have to run a utility program to make them do so?

That's done internally on modern drives. The only way you will know it is happening is by using diagnostic tools that query the drive for SMART statistics. (I should qualify that by stating that my experience is with Linux. There are utilities that can monitor SMART statistics but they may not be installed by default. I am not familiar with the level of monitoring that Windows does out of the box. I'm sure there are monitoring tools for Windows as well.) Of course if the bad sectors grow beyond the capability of the drive to remap them, then reads or writes will start to fail and the OS will report that.

 

[shadowdr]

Will HDD's automagically remap sectors to spare sectors (maybe during idle times)? Or do you have to run a utility program to make them do so?

It will try to remap those sectors actively, whether or not the drive is idle. The problem I have seen with this is that it will try to recover the data and move it to a spare sector. Recovery of the data is not always possible but it will continue to try anyway before it will move the data and then remap. Having said that there are programs that will do this for you. There was an Ultimate Boot Disk that was around years ago that contained drive tools actually called U.B.C.D because it was when CD's were the biggest removable disks at the time. I have used it many times to repair disks that would not even run windows because of bad sectors. I can't remember for sure but I believe that the program was by Fujitsu. It will run on any drive regardless of manufacturer and repair bad sectors if it at all possible. I don't know how it differed from other dos programs but it saved many a laptop hard drive. I gave it up when SSDs came out as I would not fool with an older drive that was so slow anyway. It takes a loooong time to run but almost always repaired the drive.

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Funny you mentioned partitioning off the bad sectors.

I actually did this on my Dell Latitude CPI A. 6.4Gb drive, heavily damaged from shock, head no longer parks and about 1Gb of bad sectors.
What I did was use the acronis program on F4BCD (falcon four's ultimate boot cd with Hiren's DOS tools) to make a partition to cover the middle of the hard drive where the bad sectors are. I made a rough guess as to the size but in the end, I now have 4 partitions: DOS+Win 3.1, Win98, the bad sector partition and Windows Neptune in that exact order.

Took me a few hours of guessing to get the size right and fit all the paritions on but for a 6Gb drive that's on the brink of death that's not bad.

Seriously though, just grab a WD blue drive. They beat the snot out of the old WD greens, though the WD greens are best for long term storage since speed isn't a top priority.