How to fix bad sectors or clusters on hard drive ?

G'Day ljubisa86,

Please explain - I presume this is a SATA HDD ?
- if it is an IDE then make sure the jumpers are correctly set and connect it as a Secondary Master with no Secondary Slave attached!
1. What is the Operating System you are using ?
2. Tell me what happens when you attach this drive?
3. Does the CMOS / BIOS (Setup on the Motherboard) recognize the Drive ?
4. If you are running XP or above, does the "Disk Management" (get to them via Administrative Tools -> "Computer Management") recognize the Drive ?
5. If The Operating System - in Windows Explorer recognizes the drive, have you Run a " chkdsk ?: /f /r " (change ? to drive letter) ?
6, Which HDD Regenerator version are you using ?

NB: HDD Regenerator when repairing can take up to 10 days if the HDD is really bad. In your instance it may not take that long if the only bad sectors are in the 2 to 3 GB area (sections) that said, it may have others bad sectors which obviously then will take linger!

pcbugfixer :ninja:

Delete or have a Moderator delete the duplicate posts please!!

Sorry about the duplicate posts, i had problems with my internet, and somehow the went trough.

About the HDD its SATA, and when i connect it to computer its recognized, it takes like 10 more seconds that obvious but its recognized. Also i can open the folders but after that its stops.

I just check the HDD Regenerator and it was still on 2323 MB but different sector, and it was saying 157 BAD sectors found, 139 BAD Sectors Recovered.

Is there any software that i can use to split the HDD on two partitions? Like saying hey" split the HDD from 0 sectors to 700000, or from 0GB to 3GB.
So i can put that section on a side, and never use?

Thanks for the reply,

as you said, i will answer all your questions.
I already run chkdsk /f/r and the first couple times it was showing some kind of error after 10 min of scanning and it was stopping there.

Now, when i run the same command, its going sector by sector and its saying Sector unreadable etc... something like that.

I left it to run all night, and the next morning it was doing the same thing.
Let say it started from 1700000 up to 1750000...
i think on every scan that i am doing, it show up more and more bad sectors.

PCbugfixer...
You are a very popular guy!
I am currently running HDDR on a 320 GB WD My Book Studio External USB 2.0 drive. It is attached to an Acer Laptop running Win XP Pro. The drive has an inbox file that contains many important emails. I had no problem retrieving an address book file from the same drive, but the inbox file cannot be moved off the drive, or read. I have been running HDDR for over 48 hours now with 51207000 sectors read / 25 GB read with 125 bad sectors found and 125 bad sectors recovered. At this rate, it will take 614 hours , or over 25 days to complete. Based on your previous posts, this is normal.
I have two questions:
1. Will the process speed up depending on the number of bad sectors on the drive? In other words, is it going to take all 614 hours no matter what?
2. Once I suffer through all 614 hours, how confident are you that the file will be readable / moveable to another drive?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hey all,

I have a Sony Laptop and HDD is being a to total arse. got more that 1000 bad sectors on it can this be fixed ? or its done ?

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Originally Posted by toughone

Hey all,

I have a Sony Laptop and HDD is being a to total arse. got more that 1000 bad sectors on it can this be fixed ? or its done ?

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I think that once a hard drive starts to lose data due to some issues then it tends to die very rapidly and repairing bad sectors will only stall the symptoms of an eventual failure. Therefore, what you can do is, image the drive while it's still functional, blow the image onto a new drive, and swap them. In other cases, there are many tools such as HD Workbench 1 that is a Windows 2000/XP utility that can be used to examine your disk's health utilizing S.M.A.R.T. and read/write disk tests. Data can be evacuated from failing disks by making an an exact sector by sector clone of the failing drive.

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Originally Posted by dono

ARRAGH! That is very bad advice; the last thing you ever want to do with a bad drive is to run chkdsk - that will only make things worse! Typically, the system will delete all affected files. (Google for "chkdsk deleted files")



To recover files, you want Spinrite, there is nothing else even close. It's sole function is to recover the data from bad sectors, so that you can get those files copied off onto a new drive that is not failing. I work in IT, and trust me, this is the ticket to repairing bad hard drives so files can be copied, and for checking to see the health of your good drives.

Sorry, but I had to create an account to say this, lest others get their files deleted trying to fix hard drives!

Cheers,
...Dono

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Thanks for the info Dono. I had spinrite once from Steves site and could not make heads or tails out of it.
Is there any instructions available anywhere on how to actually use it?? Thanks. :) :)

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Originally Posted by thoreau

Thanks for the info Dono. I had spinrite once from Steves site and could not make heads or tails out of it.
Is there any instructions available anywhere on how to actually use it?? Thanks. :) :)

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Well, most of us don't have the manual, and we don't know what "instructions" you followed. Were there any bad sectors on your hard drive that were causing any sort of problems? Can you please specify your problems in details? In any case, you can check out all of SpinRite's documentation are located at: http://www.grc.com/srdocs.htm

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Originally Posted by einstein_007

Well, most of us don't have the manual, and we don't know what "instructions" you followed. Were there any bad sectors on your hard drive that were causing any sort of problems? Can you please specify your problems in details? In any case, you can check out all of SpinRite's documentation are located at: http://www.grc.com/srdocs.htm

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I had a HDD at the time that would not boot up. I didn't have any instructions with the Spinrite.

I only remember a lot of intimidating red black and blue and white DOS screens with martian words in them.

There was nothing there that a non tech could make heads or tails of. Thats been about seven or eight years ago.

I think I still have the floppy somewhere. Thanks for the reply. I have my HDD working again, there was some numbers that didn't match but Drive Image 2002 fixed them for me. (partition tables?)

Thanks for your time I appreciate the help.

I have new issues right now that I will start a new thread for. Thanks.:thumbup1:

Thanks to TechArena both of my problems are solved.

The first problem the hanging "my computer" was caused by a HP Scanjet 4300C scanner. The cause was found because someone posted a link to a Microsoft page about the hanging "my computer" problem that mentioned probable causes. I never would have found it on my own in a million years.

The second problem, the fact that the router would not assign a network address to my Ethernet adapter on the first connection but required me to close the connection and reopen it a second time to get an address was solved because someone suggested using event viewer, and when I did that I saw a message that said the connection was closed by the user.
So that made me go to TCP/IP settings and try some changes because I suspected I had something misconfigured. Sure enough I had disabled NetBIOS over TCP/IP, I changed the NetBIOS setting to default

(Use NetBIOS setting from the DHCP server etc.) and that cured that problem.
A great help that put me on the right track was the TechArena feature that pops up and shows previous posts about the problem for which I was preparing to start a new thread . Thanks for the great forum.

I registered here on this forum because I found some useful info here... just thought I'd share my experiences with my bad hard drive.

My drive crashed during a partition resizing. I attempted recovery with Partition Magic 8, as well as dozens of programs on Hiran's Boot CD without success. Easus Partiton Master Home showed my NTFS partitions were still there, but deleted. I was able to "recover" the partitions, but with errors. Chkdsk crashed, as well as Spinrite. I ran the manufacture utility, which only told me my drive was bad.

I ran "HDD Regenerator v1.41" (included with Hiren's Boot CD) for an entire weekend...only to discover the following Monday that is was only 1/3 done on a 120G HD. I then stopped the scan... and attempted other fixes.

After "undeleting" the partitions with Easus Partiton Master , I was able to assign drive letters (in this case I used Windows XP "Disk Management". Suddenly like magic, my first partition (of two) showed up! (the original c drive 20G partition) I was easily now able to retrieve some important data and email.

Whenever I assigned the 2nd partition a drive letter, the "host" computer would lock up and I was unable to access this drive letter. I assume it was because I had recovered all sectors in range of the first partition 20G, but not the second. My initial weekend scan covered 85,546,158 sectors, and repaired 117,246 bad sectors, success with every bad one it found.

FYI: HDD Regenerator scans quite quickly over "good" sectors (1000 at a time)... but as soon as it finds bad ones, it slows to a crawl and fixes them one at a time, or 1MB/10min. I have been running the program for 4 days now, and I'm still about 1/3 done, with an additional 48,000+ bad sectors recovered.

So just to wrap up.. I expect HDD Regenerator 1.41 to take over a week to fix my HD.. considering the drive I almost full of bad sectors. I'm only attempting this level of recovery because I have data (mostly photos) on the 2nd partition I do not want to lose, plus I want to see if I can actually bring this HD back! It worked for the 1st partition... let's see if it makes it through the 2nd one.

Certainly NOT worth all the trouble when you consider a NEW 500G HD can be purchased at about $30. Plus who would want to RISK using a hard drive that failed (even if revived)... although it may have been caused by some other issue.

QUESTION: I am curious (maybe I missed this), does FULL DELETION & REFORMATTING automatically correct bad sectors? Or do BOTH processed need to be done?

yes there is... I'm prettymuch sure... use the Hirens Boot cd v 15.1, Trust me. It works like a charm for me... it has many features.

Bad sectors can be fixed by using a third party tool. Many manufacturers provide boot utility for their products. This utility helps you to fix the mbr, restore data, upgrade firmware, etc. For example SeaTools for seagate. First thing you have to check the product number your drive and search for the right tool on web. Or else there are bootable tools like HDD Utility or Hard Disk SentinelThis can restore the drive to some extent.

There are rare chances that your hard drive data might be restored completely. Because bad sectors are the part of driver where the data is stored and that section is damaged. You need a power tool who can scan and capture the data on that disc. First is chkdisk which is windows basic utility to scan and fix the corrupted sector of a drive. If this fails the you can go for any kind of advance drives.

You can use PBD(Partition Bad Disk) to scan the disk and isolate bad sectors to fix the bad sector problem.