Hi.
Some months ago i bought a refubished Toshiba x205 for a great price ( at least here ) and now both of my MK1237GSX HDD are failing ( guess what was reconditioned in it )
1st HDD (Vista on it ) had about 5 bad sectors that BSOD/freezed the OS but i remapped them and everything seamed ok, then 1 weak ago out of the blue vista warned me about 2nd drive failing.
I checked S.M.A.R.T. status and it fails Reallocation Sector Count and warns about Reallocation Event Count on 2nd HDD. 1st HDD warns about Reallocation Sector Count, Reallocation Event Count, Current Pending Sector Count.
I checked with the store and 2nd HDD is good for warranty, 1st isn't, but because i have to ship the laptop for 30 days to service and will only fix 2nd disk ( probably by moving G-list into P-list and leaving me with the same crapy disk or swapping in another refub) and because a previous Toshiba ( a 40G GAS if i remember right from couple years ago ) leaved a ugly mark on the wall after one morning when it trashed all my work by being detected as TO@#%@^!40G@#@%@!% and not working anymore I decided to ordered a 320 WD Scorpio Black and not ship the laptop to warranty.

So i plan to put the 2 HDDs on external racks and use them as backup and/or for storing some media, but before that i want to mark slow sectors which take more than 50ms to read as bad so there will be ( i hope ) less problems with the data.
MHDD or victoria don't work for me as i don't have a option to disable AHCI in the bios, so i want to use HDDScan to do 3 scans, write a small application that will read the reports and filter LBA that are not in all 3 files ( microcontroller may do auto offline data collection, compensate for temperature increase because of reading all hdd, etc while reading some sectors ) and feed the remaining slow sectors to a existing tool to mark them as bad so will not be used anymore.

Can anyone tell me a tool ( command line preferably ) that can mark a sector as bad in Windows ?
What is the difference between a UNC sector and a bad sector.
What is a UNC sector ?.

As far as i know bad sectors are held on the partition data structure ( so the tool has to know how to work with FAT32 and/or NTFS ) and a reformat clears them and they need to be marked again, am i right ? how about UNC sectors ?

P.S. hope i didn't killed anyone with my long boring text and thanks for taking the time to listen (read) to my problem and help if you can

Look on this website for MHDD

_________________
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

as i said MHDD and/or Victoria don't work because southbrige is ICH8 and i don't a option to disable AHCI, that is why i am looking for a windows equivalent.
HDDScan will do the scan in windows but will not mark the sectors as bad in partition structure so i basically look for a tool for windows to mark bad sectors.

even if i put the HDD in a computer without AHCI MHDD will have no effect since Realocation Sector Count attribute failing in SMART tells that G-List ( growing defects list ) is full and remapping will not work.

Victoria has a windows version and dos.

Hello, I think I can answer some of your questions. A UNC sector is a sector with an uncorrectable ECC error (40h error reg). UNC sectors are sectors that can't be read. If you can still write to the sector then there may still be hope for the sector later. If you can't then the sector is a "bad" sector and the drive should relo it. Why do you need a tool to mark bad sectors? The drive should be managing the bad sectors, unless the drive really is a piece of crap. As for the SMART stuff you mentioned, those attributes are just telling you that the drive has had some relos and UNC sectors. You can look at SMART again to get the exact #. BTW if you have a lot, it means the drive is headed downhill fast.

_________________
HDDErase v4.0 - http://cmrr.ucsd.edu/people/Hughes/SecureErase.shtml

yes, the drives are really a piece of crap, i had them replaced, but already have 4 hdd plates as shiny round drilled mirrors
Maybe i was not clear enough, the hdd doesn't relocate the bad sectors anymore because his list of bad sectors is full.
I would want to mark the slow sectors so they will not be used anymore and will not stress area around them and hdd heads.
I will not keep on hdds valuable data, only things that prefer not to re download again.

One of the hdd has 1023 relocation ( full list ) 3 bad sectors ( reported by windows ) and about 500-1k sectors that are slow ( > 150 ms to read ) so i think the hdd is still usable but not trust worthy.

Bobbyn,

The sentence: "I will not keep on hdds valuable data, only things that prefer not to re download again."
is contradictory . You'll eventually redownload all the data when the drive fails.

May as well copy all the data to /dev/null now and get it over with

SRSSA
Allen

Hi!!
My utility makebad does perform what you want....
Every weak sector will be transformed in UNC sector, so you may re-format your hd under windows and chkdsk will show you many bad block.

darthmaurizio@gmail.com