The hard drive on my parents computer has developed bad sectors located near the start of the drive.
There are 3 sectors with poor access time usually around 150ms but one is temperamental at >500ms.
I would like to remap these sectors so the head avoids them but as far as I can tell mhdd only remaps unreadable sectors.

Is there a way or a command on the console to force a remap of slow sectors??

Richard S.

This isn't the answer you were looking for, but here goes anyway ...

Check the reallocated sector count in the SMART data for the drive. Some of those "slow sectors" may already have been reallocated (moved to an area for spare sectors). You won't know which from the count.

Once a disk drive starts to "go downhill" it's a bad idea to depend on it as a "primary drive" further. You're just asking for a situation where you need the knowledgeable DR guys in this forum to take over.

Get the SMART data for your drive. If there are any reallocated sectors then it's time to stop depending on that drive as a primary drive. The Google HDD study from 2007 showed that in a server room environment that ...

"After their first reallocation, drives are over 14 times more likely to fail within 60 days than drives without reallocation counts ..."

http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

Some useful tools for getting the smart data for a disk drive are:
SpeedFan (my fave)
HDDScan
HD Tune/HD Tune Pro
CrystalDiskInfo
... many others ...

On the other hand the drive could live for months/years longer. You can't know in advance. Also keep in mind that 1/2 the time drives die without any warnings from SMART.

It's possible you could use that failing drive as one of a pair of redundant backup drives. You could partition the drive so the problem area is unused. Be prepared for trouble.

To free up the failing drive your disk drive manufacturer likely offers a disk cloning program. If you use one of those utilities then after the cloning (next shutdown) disconnect the old drive and specifically do not boot with both disks connected. The duplicate GUIDs in the MBRs can screw-up some versions of Windows. Wipe the old drive with a bootable CD/ISO of your choice and then partition/format it again with Windows (or your bootable CD/ISO). Instead of a bootable CD/ISO you could just pop the drive in a different PC and take it from there.

Good luck Rich!

See these threads:
makebad-new-utility-avoid-weak-red-brown-sector-t6538.html
manually-add-bad-sector-badclus-t6564.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.