Can mhdd v4.0 repair bad sectors?

Hi, everyone.

I've got a couple of IDE drives with uncorrectable bad sectors particularly in Track 0 and extending throughout the rest of the drive either continually or in scattered locations.

These IDE drives can still be detected on system startup but can't be partitioned/formatted due to the physical bad sectors.

Could the Scan feature of mhdd v4.0 automatically repair these bad sectors? Or can it map out/hide these failing sectors from use by any OS?

Why you don't do something like this:
pick up a bad hard disk and put it in a computer, and then you pick up the mhdd and use it, after that you can continue and then you can tell us what happens with the hard disks, worst then they are, they will not be.

Thanks, but I was expecting others to share their experiences whether mhdd could repair or map out bad sectors permanently. If this is a supported feature of mhdd then I wonder why it shouldn't be shared with others.

Yes, I tried but no success. Maybe there is something I'm missing with regards to the settings under SCAN option. I also don't completely understand what ERASE WAITS or REMAP settings do.

Posted 7/1/2005, 10:07:

Question for Dimitry: Does ERASE WAITS add the bad sectors to P-List?

No.

Follow-up question for Dmitry: Does MHDD write to G-List?

MHDD does not write to any list. MHDD just asks drive to make remap. This is drive's decision whrer to put that defect.

написано 7/1/2005, 08:41:

Some drives will put that defects into g-list.

I see.

But please shed more light on what actually happens when ERASE WAITS is selected, so we could better use your program. Kindly answer the following questions:

1. What is the default time in ms that MHDD uses to ERASE WAITS when this time is exceeded?
2. After the waits are erased, could these be detected/seen again by SCANDISK as being MARKED BAD?

1. You can see default time after MHDD will create «erase waits» string in mhdd.cfg, it is 250 ms.
2. MHDD will just erase 255 sectors. If drive will consider to remap them, they will be remapped.
3. Scandisk works with logical drives, it uses FAT to mark bad blocks. So if you repaired bad blocks using MHDD, you will need to do something to delete them from FAT, because scandisk for some reason cannot re-check bad sectors. Repartition will help. Also I've heard that Partition Magic CAN do that re-check, but I never used it.

I see. But the problem is when there are no more spare sectors the drive won't be able to remap what has been erased by ESASE WAITS, right?

Right.

if you the tool can support the function-----move glist to plist,the mhdd also can remap the hdd.am i right?

tommy is right, remap equal to write bad sector to G-List. this is difference between the P-List and G-List.

But DMITRY said MHDD does not write to any List, and the documentation says that REMAP simply writes the bad sectors with zeros. And this means that MHDD's REMAP will not result in writing the bad sectors to G-List.

DMITRY also says that MHDD simply asks the drive to do a remap, which means that REMAP cannot be done by the drive if there are no more spare sectors left in the drive's pool. And in this case, the bad sectors will still appear BAD.

It would be great if MHDD could support writing to G-List and moving the defects in G-List to P-List when G-List becomes full. Would this be possible MR. DMITRY in future versions of MHDD?

Drive will decide should and can it write them to G-List or not. MHDD just ask drive to do a remap, and it is up to drive how it will be done (G-list or any other way if any).

MHDD WILL NOT work with lists directly. Everybody who know how to work with lists know why :-)

.

написано 10/1/2005, 13:35:

And again, MHDD is the diagnostics utility.