hi
i'm an amateur seeking some advice on how to reuse a defective drive. it's a 160GB 2,5" drive i replaced in someone's laptop. i checked it and it had some bad sectors, so the owner decided to replace it with a new one, because he can't afford an unreliable drive. i recovered the stuff he wanted, he is happy and i'm left with the "junk".
as it was laying on a shelf for the past few months and i ran out of space on my lappy, i decided to give it a chance. i want to use it as a space for stuff i don't mind losing.
using systemrescuecd and unix badblocks i gathered a list of bad sectors (1024b blocks) - there are about 20 of them. by looking at the numbers, i think i could use most of the drive's space except of 2 or 3 ranges of blocks. i'd like to create a partition with ntfs filesystem. and here's the dillema:
1. is it better to make 3 or 4 ntfs partitions ommiting the bad blocks ("manually")
-or-
2. to make one big partition and pray to Lord that ntfs detects and marks the bad blocks i already know about
?
is there some kind of tool to manually feed the partitioning/formatting utility with a list of defective sectors i acquired using badblocks? (i know unix utilities can do this - but i don't want a ext?fs - compatibility, you know)
is there a way to make sure windows doesn't allocate MFT on those bad blocks? (i read
bad-blocks-mft-t12787.html#p84111)
TIA for advice