Hi,

I have a WD 640GB disk that I took out of a new'ish laptop some time back because it started to hang the laptop. The contents of the laptop was backed up so I just swapped the drive out for another and restored to factory setting.

I inserted the drive into an external SATA case, connected via USB to my laptop, created one large partition with quick format, then right clicked properties, selected tools tab and clicked on the "check now" button. I then tcked both boxes ie including check & recover bad blocks. The scan plodded along fine at the start then very soon grinded to a halt! The scan was still running just ticking over extremely slowly so I guess it was dealing with the bad blocks encountered. Once it got past that, the scan continued at a reasonable pace to the end. A message then came up to say the scan encountered problems.

From observing the scan, the bad blocks seem to be just at the beginning of the drive. Can someone please recommend a reasonably priced software tool that scans the whole drive identifying all the bad and the good blocks and then allows you to map/assign all the good blocks to one or more partitions whilst "hiding" all the bad blocks at the same time?... I know I could do this manually bad if there is a tool out there that does it automatically I would prefer to just kick a scan off and let the tool sort it out.

Thanks in advance for your help

Kevin

Hi,

Based on what I could understand from your post, you simply want the drive to relocate bad sectors. This operation will be done automatically by the drive itself when you will be writing on the weak or bad sectors. There are a bunch of free software able to accelerate / force this process.

I just googled a bit around and found these ones which should work well:
http://www.hdat2.com/
http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

You may also have a look here: http://files.hddguru.com/download/Software/

Other related software I personaly use(d) are:
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/index.html

Besides I like http://www.hdsentinel.com/ (which will cost you around EUR or USD 30 if you want to have the complete surface analysis, refresh and reinitialise feature your would need in your case).

Hope that can help you.