How are LBAs allocated to partitions?

[peter_k]

My hdd has about 1800 bad LBAs (out of total of 78k, a 40Gb HDD), but all are in the first 13k LBAs. As I understand, there are too many bad sectors/LBAs to repair the entire disk. But I don't mind loosing the 6,3 Gb that is represented by the 13k LBAs.

My thinking is to create two partitions, a first of 6,5 Gb, and the next with the remainder, and only format and use the second, and ignore the first one.

But this only works if the first 13k LBAs are automatically allocated to that first partition, if I create it in XP (or DOS?). Is this the case? Or any other ideas or advice?

Thanks,

Peter

[pepe]

Hi

this might work, as XP allocates space for partitions sequentialy.
However I don't recommend using such drive neither for data storage nor as a system drive as it might get worse soon...
pepe

[peter_k]

ok thanks, I'll give it a try.
Currenty I did the analysis with HDDScan, but on a disk level. What freeware under windows (I don't want to create a dos bootdisk) can I use to check LBA allocations to the different partitions?

[bsnyder]

I think this is what you're looking for: http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mb ... .htm#xamps

And look at your "Relative Sectors", "Total Sectors", etc in LBA 0 using any freeware disk-level hex editor, like HxD

[peter_k]

I created two partitions, the first of 6 Gb (with all the bad LBAs), which I never plan to use, and the second of 31 Gb, that I could format in a normal way, and that seems to work (I'll confirm tonight with the tool bsnyder suggests; I tested it on my work pc, and XP partitions indeed are using the LBAs sequentially, as said by pepe)

Hence, mission accomplished. Kind of, coz I was a bit disappointed to throw away 16% of the disk (6.5Gb!). This hardly seems optimal, because there are only about 4% of bad/slow LBAs. Is there a solution to discard only the bad LBAs, and use the good LBAs scattered around in between (although visually on the HDD map, it's a massacre: the 2500 bad/slow LBA's seem to be really everywhere in the first area of 14k LBAs). Any tips/advice how to do better?