Ever had a harddrive that's just fine, with only a small area containing bad blocks?
What I usually do in those cases (when data isn't important) is run a linux sudo badblocks -s -v -w /dev/sdXY (replace -w with -n for less rigorous non-destructive bad blocks test).
I write down which block numbers are bad, and manually calculate by hand at what percentage of the disc that area is and build my partitions (with some extra space) around those weak sectors. It works for me, and I happily used many discs for years as passive backup medium for biology movies and music
While trying to solve my RAID cloning problem here (
http://scforum.info/index.php/topic,9592.0.html), I stumbled upon a program totally unknown to me.... Partition.Bad.Disk 3.3.2 (
http://www.goodlucksoft.com).
PBD (Partition Bad Disk): isolate bad sectors / blocks / clusters of a HDD hard drive disc.
One day you might hear strange sound from your hard drive. The computer hangs when reading/writing files, cloning partitions, formatting/checking the disk. Windows finally fails to start up after bitter attempts of reading data from HDD. The disk volumes disappear in the Explorer.
Well, all these are probably caused by bad sectors on your HDD. To fix this problem, you can isolate the bad sectors so that OS will ignore/bypass them. There are two methods for bad sector isolation. The first method is partitioning the disk to exclude bad sectors from any created partition.
But have you been bored with partitioning bad disks with bad sectors? Did you lose your patience in the past when scanning the disk, writing down the positions of bad sectors, and calculating the start/stop position of partitions in order to block/hide bad sectors?
Now you need not do that manually.
PBD (Partition Bad Disk) can do all these annoying things for you by detecting/isolating bad sectors and creating healthy partitions. You can also adjust the properties of partitions such as the size, the start/stop postions at will, just like an ordinary partition software.
The second bad block isolation method is marking bad clusters in the file system. You can now use PBD Super Format option to format the partition and hide bad clusters smoothly.
GUI looks a bit complicated, but I'm planning on testing it once I'm fully done with cloning my old server disc to my new RAID volume. First, I'll run a destructive badblocks -s -v -w on it...
Karma!
Devvie
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