Fixing bad sectors

[kdon27]

I recently ran into some trouble with my 2TB WD Caviar Green.

It was an external drive but the enclosure broke so I hooked it up straight to SATA on my mobo.

But now I have run to a few problems.

Here's a summary:

1- Win7 "cannot format this drive".
2- Virtual Disk Manager, "I/O device error occurred".
3- ChkDsk, failed.
4- Write zeros format, failed.
5- SMART diagnostics, unable to complete.


I'm currently trying HDD regenerator, found quite a few bad sectors.

So my question is how can I partition the drive to sequester the bad sectors and let me use the remaining space?

I cannot even format it or get it to work through Virtual disk manager.

Thank-you for your time

 

[lonewolf7]

Is the HDD physically damaged? If not, try to format with "Bootable DVD/USB", virtual disk manager wont help. Out of curiosity is it a storage drive?

 

[Gamoholic]

Did you buy hdd regenerator or are you just using the trial to get a report? There is no way to partition around bad sectors, you need to fix them. I personally recommend SpinRite for this kind of thing. I used it on several hard drives that I thought were dead. Turns out they only had minor problems. So SpinRite has already given me back several hard drives and reassured me that many more are working well. I hope your hard drive doesn't turn out to be like a 500GB WD Caviar Black of mine. I ran SpinRite on it for a week and it only got to about 50% after finding thousands of bad and irrecoverable sectors. I still need to RMA that one...

 

[kdon27]

Is the HDD physically damaged? If not, try to format with "Bootable DVD/USB", virtual disk manager wont help. Out of curiosity is it a storage drive?

Thanks for your reply lonewolf7.

I don't know for sure if there is any physical damage on it but I've never heard any wierd noises coming from it even when I did the full ChkDsk (which didn't help).

It is indeed a storage drive, used to contain most of my data but I moved onto a 3TB so I stopped using it but recently felt the need for additional backups (hence the attempts to revive it).

 

[kdon27]

Did you buy hdd regenerator or are you just using the trial to get a report? There is no way to partition around bad sectors, you need to fix them. I personally recommend SpinRite for this kind of thing. I used it on several hard drives that I thought were dead. Turns out they only had minor problems. So SpinRite has already given me back several hard drives and reassured me that many more are working well. I hope your hard drive doesn't turn out to be like a 500GB WD Caviar Black of mine. I ran SpinRite on it for a week and it only got to about 50% after finding thousands of bad and irrecoverable sectors. I still need to RMA that one...

Thank-you for the reply Gamoholic.

I purchased HDD regenerator based on people's recommendations on how it works to fix bad sectors and make the drive usable again to some extent.

I will try SpinRite now and post back.

And I hope it's not so far damaged! But given the extended time that HDD Regen takes I think I am in the same boat unfortunately. And RMA is out of the question..

 

[lonewolf7]

So if the HDD is not damaged your best bet to use a bootable media and try to format it. I think it will work. Good Luck.

 

[kdon27]

Thanks for that lonewolf7, will try to give it a go.

Still trying with SpinRite now but odd problem comes up...

The drive is now on SATA but *sometimes* BIOS doesn't detect it and other times it does... I tried different ports and and all but same problem - occasional moments of malfunction.