Best way to repair bad sectors?

[Donny Bahama]

I have a Maxtor 300GB IDE drive that's reporting some (28 so far) bad sectors. There's no data to recover, here; I just want to repair the sectors (if possible - or block them off as unusable) before including this disk in a RAID5 array on my media server.

I tried to use HDD Regenerator via Hiren's Boot CD, but when I run it, it says no drives found. (Which is really weird because there are THREE drives installed - not counting the USB flash drive I'm booting from.)

Suggestions, please?

[Donny Bahama]

46 views and not a single response?

[Starling]

reporting some (28 so far) bad sectors.

where did you get this number from?

[lcoughey]

I don't suggest you bother, unless you would like to have your RAID array crash shortly after you get all your data onto it.

[drc]

Yup, toss it

[Starling]

I mean if it shows 28 reallocated sectors in SMART that's good working drive.

[Donny Bahama]

reporting some (28 so far) bad sectors.

where did you get this number from?

From a utility in Ubuntu that reads the SMART data. I mistyped that, though; the number is 268.

[BlackST]

Solutions: 1) live with it , 2) discard drive , 3) I can fix it 100% but I'm too far 4) do something else maybe something will work (maybe ?).

[drc]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822145305

$48, free shipping, problem solved

[Donny Bahama]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145305

$48, free shipping, problem solved

Perfect! I'll send you my paypal @ddress so you can send me the $48.

[Donny Bahama]

I can fix it 100% but I'm too far

Next time in Italy, maybe...

So the only fix is strictly a hardware fix?

[Donny Bahama]

I'm not sure what the warranty was on this drive, but I'm pretty sure I bought it less than 5 years ago. I'll check with Maxtor and see if maybe they'll replace it under warranty. Otherwise, I think my RAID array just went from 1.5TB to 1.2TB.

Thanks very much for the responses, everyone!

[drc]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145305

$48, free shipping, problem solved

Perfect! I'll send you my paypal @ddress so you can send me the $48.

Ha ha and all, but in seriousness, WHY trust your data to known bad equipment when replacement is so cheap

[ccamargol]

HDD regenerator...

[arvika]

HDD regenerator is very bad software...

[thatdellguy]

HDD Regenerator is one of the worst software’s you could run on a drive when it is failing. If you’re wondering if we just say this because its some miracle software, it really does kill more drives than it saves. No professional hard drive repairing program would ever write back to a failing drive. I cringe when a customer tells me that they ran HDD Regenerator or Spinrite for days and now the drive is clicking. Use these software’s at your own risk. Like I said in my other post, most of the drives which come in and are deemed unrecoverable are mainly due to the customer doing something stupid.

[othersteve]

I just wanted to chime in here with my relatively uninformed technician's opinion and say that on many occasions, when the customer is no longer concerned with the health of a particular drive and the drive has been successfully imaged, I have found that HDD Regenerator can indeed miraculously repair the drive's bad sectors. I have seen 200-300 of them "repaired" by the utility and no more surfaced thereafter. I don't really understand why this works, but I swear it does actually work in some situations.

I know you HDD repair pros hate it, and I can understand why you would fundamentally be averse to such "magic pill" programs, much like an expert plumber is averse to the use of Liquid Plumber-like solvents: they often do more harm than good. But can anyone shed some light as to why exactly this sometimes works to "revive" a failing drive? I have used it on multiple occasions to produce "spare" drives for myself (non-mission-critical storage) and it works more often than my personal logic should suggest.

[drc]

It overwrites soft bads causing them not to be bad anymore and triggers the HD's firmware to add hard bads to g-list and replace with spare sectors. Nothing that a simple MHDD erase wouldn't also achieve.

Of course adding hard bads to g-list en masse can cause more problems later on, and many times soft bads are likely to get bad again.

[ccamargol]

It is necessary to know in that moment for using it, obvious does not work for all the cases, I have been able to save but informacióin without affecting the hard disk

[craig6928]

HDD regenerator is very bad software...

because if you dont use it right it will kill your hard drive