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Using drive marked as damaged?


thepregnantgod

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I noticed this. However, it only allows me to mark unchecked blocks good or bad blocks "unchecked."

 

What I want to do is use this drive but also still have scanner integration flag bad drives...etc.

Doing it in reverse order gets you what you want, mark the bad blocks unchecked, then mark the unchecked blocks as good. The entire drive is then considered good.

 

You should really rescan the drives though, if your wipe did not reallocate the bad sectors then you are still in danger of losing data.

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Unfortunately this is basically normal behavior. 

 

A quick format will not fix this issue either. That basically just wipes the file allocation table, and starts from scratch (basically empties NTFS's database on the volume, without writing to the actual bits).

You'd either need to run a full format (which can take hours, or days), or you need to run "chkdsk x: /r" (where x: is the drive in question). If you're using Windows 8 or server 2012, (or up), you can add "/scan" to the command and continue using the drive as normal.

 

 

Specifically the reason for this behavior is that a) we never, ever, ever write to a disk (well, except to recover said files, or file system, but only AFTER asking you), and b.) bad sectors are only reallocated when the disk attempts to write to the physical location. When it fails, you get an increase to the  "reallocated sector count" setting in SMART, and it actually remaps the damaged sector to a new location on the disk. 

This last bit (reallocating the sector) means that you cannot ever restore the data from the bad (and now reallocated) sector. This is why we do not right to it. So that you can run recovery software, if you want/need to. Or so we can attempt to read the data (we 20 different "head placement profiles" to attempt to read the data during the recovery attempt. But we write to a different location/disk.

 

The full format writes to the entire disk, and chkdsk /r identifies these bad sectors, and attempts to recovery them... or force the disk to reallocate them.

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I've always done a "Reinitialize disk surface" using Hard Disk Sentinel and it has never failed me, it always forces the hard drive to reallocate the bad sectors. It's not free, but well worth the cost.

 

I expect any software that can write zeros to the entire drive (Low level format) would work too, I have never been able to get chkdsk to work to fix the sectors.

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I've always done a "Reinitialize disk surface" using Hard Disk Sentinel and it has never failed me, it always forces the hard drive to reallocate the bad sectors. It's not free, but well worth the cost.

 

I expect any software that can write zeros to the entire drive (Low level format) would work too, I have never been able to get chkdsk to work to fix the sectors.

A full format (not quick) should do this as well.

As well as diskpart's "clean all" (this sets the disk pack to an uninitialized state, and writes zeros to the entire disk.

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