Hi!
I playing with a 250gb 2.5" WD drive. The drive has developed bad sector from physical trauma, but is otherwise working fine. I've gotten around the bad sectors by just leaving the damaged 20gb file there, and using the areas around it.
Decide I'd like to using it to beef up my 60gb PS3 I want to mark all bad and failing areas before I stick it into the PS3.
I don't care much if the drive fails at some point, but IMO it would have failed already (~12mo after the first bad blocks).

First I went with WD DLG, but it gave up as soon as it hit the bad areas. IBM driveFitness didn't work for some reason, so googling lead me to mhdd.

Ok, I started with a SCAN with remap on, and worked nicely until the bad blocks started. Most were marked UNC, some AMNF but after a while I just started to get question marks for timeouts. After a few hours I canceled the scan and could not access the drive until a hard restart.
I lowered the timeout to 5s, but after a while the disk again started timing out.

MHDD is documentation is very patchy so here I am writing this.

The makebad command could be what I'm looking for, but I'm unsure on how to use it.

Would you help out a bit?
I don't really care if I have to lose 50gb of space, just to get any use out of it.

TL;DR: drive has bad blocks, want to mark them all

Update, at the third run I lowered the timeouts to 2 and it managed to pass the bad area. Smooth sailing from that point on.
Still waiting for it to finish.

So what do I do after it finishes? SCAN+erase delays or run erase first then scan+eraseDelays?
What about makebad?

Went with scan+erase waits, but the disk timesout on the affected areas
Any ideas?

No point in scanning, just do a full erase. If the drive can't complete that then there is nothing more you can do for it.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I did try erase after scan+delete waits got stuck on the same patch a few times.
Erase couldn't finish as the disk went offline/timeouts on the bad area.
I'm doing a scan+remap of the area just now, and after that I'll just partition the drive to skip the bad sectors.
I'll use it for transfer of unimportant data until it croaks (if).
Don't wanna risk playing with ps3 as I don't know how it'll handle the bad sector, so I'll put in another drive.

There's no point to this. The drive will remap by itself (if it can) if it fails a write during the erase. If it is unable to remap on its own then that is indicative of further issues.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Well, I don't really care about the drive, so I'll play with it
One need to learn stuff lol.
I let it do a limited scan+remap of the affected area and I'm still waiting on it to finish.

If the disk is willing I'll partition it so the data avoids the bad area (it's around 10%, so 24gb first partition and the rest for data).