Can Damaged Sectors be repaired using Disk Utility or without formatting

[Star Skye]

I am having an Apple iBook G4 on which I have hard disk of 60GB. I have observed that my system hangs in between then I have looked for a solution and found that my hard disk is damaged may be some bad sectors on it. I tried some another program for backup but it didn’t worked; I even used disk utility but end up with the same thing. I have one external drive on which I want to copy my old drive data, but this utility doesn’t allow me to do the same. Can you give me some suggestions on it?

[DanielV]

I don’t know how to work with these stuffs but I can give you an idea where the thing you want can be done. For this you need to download ubuntu image from their website and then you need to write the downloaded image to the external drive you are having. Followed by I had numerous successes with ddrescue through no units no procedure similar to this. It is free and open source software GNU. It copies data starting individual file or block device (hard drive, cdrom, etc) to another, trying to rescue data in case of read errors. Take long, but save the data.

[Star Skye]

The thing you told sounds good and thanks for the reply you gave. I would be able to take the backup of my data by using your mentioned trick. I would definitely take the backup of my data as it seems to be important for me. But I would like to know some software’s or utility from you where that one would scan my hard drive which is having the damaged sectors so that my drive also gets repaired. So let me know such utility and replace the bad sectors and use the same hard disk also.

[mesterio]

As your hard drive is getting worse or bad day by day I would recommend you to format your drive as this process would remove the bad sectors which your disk is having. As you said that your drive is getting problem so if you don’t make it now then definitely your HDD will fail, and this one will fail soon and once it has gone, it has gone, there is no way for taking the backup and then you even won’t have the data that you needed.

[kraal]

You may try this in order to verify that on what stage is your hard disk in. I recommend you to check for the S.M.A.R.T utility of your disk. You can do this by going to BIOS setup and then you will find this option. Run the test and if the results you found are with red or pink mark then your hard disk is in trouble and if the test gives you green marks then your drive is not going faulty just except some bad sectors is to be replaced.

[Filiberto]

Every part of this is carried out within the hard disk firmware hardware stage. If it is noticeable as bad, after that the hard disk had been reassigned. The problem is re-assigned only once you know it's bad, that is, when it causes data loss. It cannot do it before the data is lost, because it looks bad until you have lost. If the PC is picking up bad sectors, then this is a bad data, which can be caused by a hard disk failure, or may be caused by an operating system error.