Replying to How To Remove Bad Sectors Or Bad Clusters From HDD

Try PBD(Partition Bad Disk) to isolate bad sectors and fix the bad sector issue. It creates healthy partitions(no bad sectors included in these partitions).

First purchase an external USB drive.
Backup all your personal files on the external drive.
Then purchase a brand new internal drive. Get each driver you will need, and add these drivers on the external disk.
Then replace the faulty drive by the new one. Proceed to a fresh install, creating a partition for the operating system.
And then leave all your files on the external drives, get the necessary ones only each time you really need them.

well laid out instructions yordan

I think another great option would be to purchase a new hard drive

First purchase an external USB drive.
Backup all your personal files on the external drive.
Then purchase a brand new internal drive. Get each driver you will need, and add these drivers on the external disk.
Then replace the faulty drive by the new one. Proceed to a fresh install, creating a partition for the operating system.
And then leave all your files on the external drives, get the necessary ones only each time you really need them.

I think another great option would be to purchase a new hard drive

try PBD(partition bad disk)

You've mentioned "Bad sectors are physical defects on the surface of the hard drive and they can't be erased. The best you can do is identify them and move them to a different physical area of the drive.". My question is that if it is a physical defect e.g. in the form of a scratch, then how can it be moved to a different physical location?

The defect is not moved to another physical location. Simply, the data which should be written on the scratched place, the data are told to be written in another sector of the disk.

You've mentioned "Bad sectors are physical defects on the surface of the hard drive and they can't be erased. The best you can do is identify them and move them to a different physical area of the drive.". My question is that if it is a physical defect e.g. in the form of a scratch, then how can it be moved to a different physical location?

you can't... well some softwares can actually try and retrieve some of the data if it can... otherwise its not available anymore

Hope I can shed some light on this topic. If not I will at least provide some interesting references. I listen to the Security Now podcast (http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm) and one of the hosts is Steve Gibson http://en.wikipedia....ter_programmer) which produces a hard drive utility which I use and recommend called SpinRite (http://www.grc.com/intro.htm). Steve is fairly well know to the tech community from his appearances on the "The Screen Savers" (http://g4tv.com/scre...vers/index.html) television show and his avid crusade against spyware. This is all going to the point that he knows what he is talking about.

Over the years Steve has talked about the inner workings of hard drives as this is a dear subject to him. Here is what I have gathered from the many discussions about hard drives and bad sectors in particular. Bad sectors are physical defects on the surface of the hard drive and they can't be erased. The best you can do is identify them and move them to a different physical area of the drive. With drives getting to be so large, a certain amount of free space is left intentionally on the platters for this very reason. Modern drives are constantly monitoring the data written and read from the platters via internal checksums (such as CRC or similar checksums). If the drives detects that a sector is about to become unreadable, it internally moves that data to a different physical sector and marks the bad sector to be put out of service.

A side effect of this scheme is that a sector cannot be examined unless it is requested. This means that if you copy a file to the hard drive and then not access it for years (think all of those Windows install files) it has a higher chance to go bad then a regularly accessed file. When a bad sector is accessed, first the hard drive tries to recover the sector internally. If that fails, a message is sent to the operating system stating that the sector is bad.

A scary fact is that most of the raw data read form the platters is bad and has mistakes in it. The checksums and internal recovery mechanisms within modern hard drives are so good that they are able to clean the data and present it to the operating system. If more people understood the inner workings of hard drives, they would certainly back up more.

You've mentioned "Bad sectors are physical defects on the surface of the hard drive and they can't be erased. The best you can do is identify them and move them to a different physical area of the drive.". My question is that if it is a physical defect e.g. in the form of a scratch, then how can it be moved to a different physical location?

If i am not wrong then the disks that are sent to the western digital or any recovery media are for the data recovery. Once the physical sectors are mapped they don't resale or send the same drive and they usually suggest either buying or replacing the drive with the new one. That is what happened to my seagate drive which was damaged and later given to the company only to get replaced with the new one.

exactly... meaning the cost of it being fixed for reuse is worth more than just getting a new one right? but they can still be fixed though i presume

If i am not wrong then the disks that are sent to the western digital or any recovery media are for the data recovery. Once the physical sectors are mapped they don't resale or send the same drive and they usually suggest either buying or replacing the drive with the new one. That is what happened to my seagate drive which was damaged and later given to the company only to get replaced with the new one.