Disk Repair?

[Guest]

Hi. Got a Quantum Fireball ATA 6.4 gig harddrive which can't
be formatted because of damaged sectors, is there a utility that can fix this out there somewhere for free? Didn't help with a low level format as far as i know.. If i had money i'd just throw it away but i'm broke..
thanks.

mr.One

 

[Ncogneto]

No there isn't, not if a low level format did no help. Bad sectors are caused by one of two things:

1) A failing hard drive
2) a shock to the hard drive which resulted in a scratch on a disk. ( much like a scratch on an old record)

If your bad sectors were caused by 1 then your just better off throwing it away. If it was cause number two then you can try to find where they are and isolate them. To do this you will preferably need another computer. Install the suspect drive and fdisk it into several partitions (to make finding the bad sectors easier). Format and scandisk each partition to find where your bad sectors lay. After you have isolated then to one partition, delete all the other partitions keeping the partition with bad sectors in place and re-fdisk deleting all the unnecessary partitions to make two larger, usable partitions. This will give you now three seperate partitions, unless you are lucky enough to have your bad sectors at the begining or end of your disk. Format these two new paritions. Now you have three partitions on your hard drive, two good and one bad. Last of all, one last time, fdisk, deleting the partition with bad sectors and leave it that way. This now makes the section of your hard drive with bad sectors invisible to your OS and it will not attempt to write data to it. Make sure you scan your good partitions periodically to insure your drive is not developing any more bad sectors.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

 

[ejsmith2]

Yeah.

If it's within the first couple of sectors of the drive, you're screwwed. The drive, bios, and os need (for whatever *good* reason) those first couple of sectors good for boot purposes.

Other than the first few (I don't know the specific number), the drive should still work fine...

 

[danny0085]

here I give you a tutorial "Disk Repair"

http://tips-debian.blogspot.com/2008/04/repair-hard-disk.html

 

[Crazy-PC]

No there isn't, not if a low level format did no help. Bad sectors are caused by one of two things:

1) A failing hard drive
2) a shock to the hard drive which resulted in a scratch on a disk. ( much like a scratch on an old record)

If your bad sectors were caused by 1 then your just better off throwing it away. If it was cause number two then you can try to find where they are and isolate them. To do this you will preferably need another computer. Install the suspect drive and fdisk it into several partitions (to make finding the bad sectors easier). Format and scandisk each partition to find where your bad sectors lay. After you have isolated then to one partition, delete all the other partitions keeping the partition with bad sectors in place and re-fdisk deleting all the unnecessary partitions to make two larger, usable partitions. This will give you now three seperate partitions, unless you are lucky enough to have your bad sectors at the begining or end of your disk. Format these two new paritions. Now you have three partitions on your hard drive, two good and one bad. Last of all, one last time, fdisk, deleting the partition with bad sectors and leave it that way. This now makes the section of your hard drive with bad sectors invisible to your OS and it will not attempt to write data to it. Make sure you scan your good partitions periodically to insure your drive is not developing any more bad sectors.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

I agree with his method, you just need to try the method 2 if it won't help you, you can assume this is a really failed harddrive and can throw it away.