Scan for and mark bad sectors without recovery attempt?

[Gregg Eshelman]

I have a 500 gig 2.5" SATA drive on which I know are some bad spots.

I want to QUICKLY scan it and mark the bad sectors without wasting any time on recovery attempts. There's nothing on the drive and it's been given a quick format. If I try a full format it fails partway through. Attempting to recover bad sectors will just waste a lot of time.

Windows 10's check from the GUI has been nerfed. You don't get to make it scan a drive for bad spots unless Windows has determined there may be a problem. To get CHKDSK in an elevated command prompt to *look* for bad sectors requires the /R switch, which also makes it waste time fruitlessly attempting to *recover* the data in them.

I want something that goes along doing its test "Oh! This one's bad. I'll mark it bad and, NEXT!"

Once I know where the bad zone is, I can partition it right up close to that. Won't be using the drive for anything 'mission critical'.

 

[SkyNetRising]

You can get a list of bad sectors with mhdd.
Run scan without relocation and set timeout to some small value (1s for example).
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

 

[BFG-9000]

Bootable Spinrite does a great job, but it's not free. Level 2 does exactly as you ask (and as it's read-only is the highest level recommended for SSDs).

It's very thorough but not fast with large drives though, so a 500GB drive takes about 4 hours at level 2.