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How Does Scanner Treat Sectors Marked As Bad?


ikon

Question

Recently I took 4x2TB drives out of service because Scanner said at least 1 of them has unreadable sectors. I then attached 1 of the drives to a test bench computer and ran SpinRite on it at Level 4. It ran for almost 300 hours. At the end it cleared the drive as ready for service again, presumably meaning any bad sectors had been reallocated to some list of bad sectors and spare sectors assigned in the place of the bad ones (at least this is how I think it's supposed to work).

Then, as a further test, I used a USB drive dock to connect the drive to my Windows 10 Server so I could run Scanner on it. Scanner came back saying 3 sectors were unreadable.

So, the question is: does Scanner read the raw sectors regardless of whether they're in a so-called bad list, or does it skip such sectors? I recall Christopher saying that what SpinRite really does is force the hard drive's own firmware to reallocate bad sectors. If so, wouldn't those sectors be hidden from Scanner? I'm confused.

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Well, I did manually trigger a scan using the little window to the left of the large grid display of hard drive blocks. It seemed to find the same areas. After I told it to mark all unreadable areas as good, it came back with a SMART warning that some indicators show that the drive may be failing.

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