Question Reading G-listed bad sectors on the harddrive.

[ZMacZ]

Ellos,

i just found a somewhat preculiar state on a drive,
which listed several bad sectors ina row down to an exact number of 100.
Now I know thise can be coincidence, but really ?

Now my question is,
Can I somehow instruct that drive to read the contents of those sectors,
and display them for me, even though they 'officially' G-listed ?

the reason for this, is that i think it's just another way for a virus to hide something on
a harddrive while pretending the sectors are bad.

if such a tool would exist to try read those sectors, I'm thinking a hacker could potentially
use the harddrive's mechanism under the OS to simply hijack some space using the re-allocation events,
while using the commands to instruct the harddrive to read it's real content from said physic
sectors, and thus allow for smoe way to hijack other parts of possibly the OS or apps.

So, to be clear, this is not an attempt to squeeze more life out of old drive,
but actually to see if a harddrive's internal hardware can be used to aid hackers,
and possibly to help forego future manufacting of harddrives, with such a built in exploitable.

Persoanlly, I'd hate to have to use such a harddrive for myself,
always knowing that such ahcks exists.

(even back in the days when sectors 81 and 82 on a floppy could not be read by regular sector reading
instructions to the hardware, buta always needed some kind of tool beit software or hardware
implemented)

Anyways, if you know anything about this, plz list so.
If all you can offer is "You should replace the drive", then plz do NOT add your comment for it's neither
useful or helpful, and will clutter any real responses.

Thank you for your time..

 

[popatim]

Use spinrite to re-examine those sectors to see if they have really failed or not. It will ignore what the drive says are bad sectors and check for itself, so anything that might be there will get wiped during testing and then Zero'd if found to be still good and placed back into service.

So if it says the sectors are really bad, then they really are.
It also does better testing then SMART does so it can 'rejuvenate' sectors as well so any found to be good still may have been marked bad by SMART's weaker testing.