Trying to fix a hard disk crash!

[mbigna]

My notebook drive crashed a while back. It was partitioned as a single drive, but I started getting lots of bad sectors near the beginning of the disk (about 2% of the clusters were bad).

I ran scandisk (DOS) to find and mark all the bad clusters, then I got everything off the disk I wanted. Then I reformatted, but could not because of bad sectors. I tried repartitioning and reformatting again, but was still unsuccessful.

Does anyone know of a tool I can use to rescan the surface before formatting, and remark all the bad sectors so I can get a little more use out of this drive?

The notebook is an IBM Thinkpad i 1400 series TYPE 2521-1460. The drive is 4.8 GB.

 

[ThePerfectCore]

Low level format. That'll kill all the bad sectors.

 

[mbigna]

Low level format. That'll kill all the bad sectors.

I've been looking for a low level format utility on the IBM site, to no avail. Is there one out there in shareware land? I doesn't seem to be something terribly complicated. But, I realize that the utility might be specifically for a single drive or line of drives...

 

[cack01]

I have tried many times to look for a low level format utility but so far nothing.

 

[toastedzergling]

it's called Drive Fitness Test, DFT on IBM site