Ignore bad sectors

[ugean]

Hi. A few months ago I had some sectors go bad on my C drive (WD500KS). I replaced it with an SSD reinstalled W10 and all that good stuff. Now I'm kind of a drive collector. There are 9 drives in the case in total. I put the bad drive in an external and formatted it and "healed" it using the windows utility. I know it will eventually die but it has been running stable for a few months now. So I decided to put it back in the case as it was a fairly good size drive. I wanted to use it for backups and unimportant things. Well that caused me to have this bootmgr issue that I found is common when you install W10 on an SSD. I got that all fixed by hot swapping the drive. But now every boot it tries to repair that drive that went bad and always gives me this pop-up that the recycle bin on the drive is corrupt. I don't care. How can I get it to just use what's left of the drive?

 

[abbadon_34]

Pick a format and stick with it (mbr/gpt/partitions). Use a basic utility to mark bad sectors off limit. It will be the very slow long overnight option. Dont use it as anything important or os related, just data. Keep in mind once part goes bad it is likely more will go bad at a quicker rate compared to other identical disks.

 

[molletts]

It's worth using a utility that overwrites the entire drive several times with different patterns (such as a security erase utility). That's about as close as you can get to a low-level format these days and allows the drive to map out the bad sectors itself and substitute good ones from its reserve of spare sectors.

Some disk utilities have a read/write media test that writes patterns to the disk then reads them back to check that the disk is readable (I use the Linux badblocks utility for this).

 

[ugean]

Pick a format and stick with it (mbr/gpt/partitions). Use a basic utility to mark bad sectors off limit. It will be the very slow long overnight option. Dont use it as anything important or os related, just data. Keep in mind once part goes bad it is likely more will go bad at a quicker rate compared to other identical disks.

Thank you for the prompt replies. Any suggestions on a freeware utility to use?

 

[ugean]

It's worth using a utility that overwrites the entire drive several times with different patterns (such as a security erase utility). That's about as close as you can get to a low-level format these days and allows the drive to map out the bad sectors itself and substitute good ones from its reserve of spare sectors.

Some disk utilities have a read/write media test that writes patterns to the disk then reads them back to check that the disk is readable (I use the Linux badblocks utility for this).

I don't have Linux and suggestions for W10?

 

[molletts]

I don't have Linux and suggestions for W10?

A bit of Googling suggests that HDDScan has an "erase test" which sounds like a fairly rudimentary equivalent to a badblocks scan. It's not clear from the description whether it does a read-and-compare after writing the data, though. You may need to queue a read test after the erase test. I don't have Windows so I can't check this.

Alternatively, you could use a security drive wiper that verifies each pass - I believe DBAN can do this. The verify just ensures that the drive can read back the wipe pattern successfully from each sector. (I've come across drives that work fine for some of badblocks' default patterns but fail on others.)

Stephen

 

[ugean]

I don't have Linux and suggestions for W10?

A bit of Googling suggests that HDDScan has an "erase test" which sounds like a fairly rudimentary equivalent to a badblocks scan. It's not clear from the description whether it does a read-and-compare after writing the data, though. You may need to queue a read test after the erase test. I don't have Windows so I can't check this.

Alternatively, you could use a security drive wiper that verifies each pass - I believe DBAN can do this. The verify just ensures that the drive can read back the wipe pattern successfully from each sector. (I've come across drives that work fine for some of badblocks' default patterns but fail on others.)

Stephen

Thank you! I will give those a try when I get home tonight.

 

[ugean]

I don't have Linux and suggestions for W10?

A bit of Googling suggests that HDDScan has an "erase test" which sounds like a fairly rudimentary equivalent to a badblocks scan. It's not clear from the description whether it does a read-and-compare after writing the data, though. You may need to queue a read test after the erase test. I don't have Windows so I can't check this.

Alternatively, you could use a security drive wiper that verifies each pass - I believe DBAN can do this. The verify just ensures that the drive can read back the wipe pattern successfully from each sector. (I've come across drives that work fine for some of badblocks' default patterns but fail on others.)

Stephen

I can't get the HDDscan to run. When I run the exe I get the admin warning box and hit yes then nothing happens. I looks like it is running in task manager but not using any resources. Is it because the program is 32 bit and I'm on a 64 bit OS?

 

[molletts]

I can't get the HDDscan to run. When I run the exe I get the admin warning box and hit yes then nothing happens. I looks like it is running in task manager but not using any resources. Is it because the program is 32 bit and I'm on a 64 bit OS?

Oops, sorry - I read your post then got distracted and forgot to reply!

It shouldn't make any difference that you're on a 64-bit OS. I suppose you could try doing "Run as admin" directly rather than letting it ask for admin (I've had a few issues in the past with programs not quite working as expected when Windows attempts to auto-elevate them).

Failing that, try DBAN but be ultra-careful that you select the right drive to nuke! (Maybe disconnect all the others just to be on the safe side!)

Alternatively, you could boot a minimal Linux live environment (such as the Gentoo AdminCD or SysRescueCD) and use badblocks - if you need to do this, let me know and I'll write more detailed instructions as to how to identify the right drive to wipe. (Badblocks, like most Unix-ish software, doesn't take prisoners.)

Stephen

 

[ugean]

I can't get the HDDscan to run. When I run the exe I get the admin warning box and hit yes then nothing happens. I looks like it is running in task manager but not using any resources. Is it because the program is 32 bit and I'm on a 64 bit OS?

Oops, sorry - I read your post then got distracted and forgot to reply!

It shouldn't make any difference that you're on a 64-bit OS. I suppose you could try doing "Run as admin" directly rather than letting it ask for admin (I've had a few issues in the past with programs not quite working as expected when Windows attempts to auto-elevate them).

Failing that, try DBAN but be ultra-careful that you select the right drive to nuke! (Maybe disconnect all the others just to be on the safe side!)

Alternatively, you could boot a minimal Linux live environment (such as the Gentoo AdminCD or SysRescueCD) and use badblocks - if you need to do this, let me know and I'll write more detailed instructions as to how to identify the right drive to wipe. (Badblocks, like most Unix-ish software, doesn't take prisoners.)

Stephen

Thanks I'm not going to have time to mess with it for a few days. Maybe on Friday I'll have some time to play around with it.