Hey,

I've got a 20gb 2.5" drive that's very promising, with just a few patches of bad sectors at the top and bottom of the drive with 13gb in-between that's flawless. I wanted to bring it close to 20gb again and throw it in a USB enclosure. I'm trying to use MHDD on it to "mask" all the potentially "hazardous" sectors so they won't be used.

I found an awesome function in MHDD, the "scan" function. It ran through my drive and found all the problem areas. It knew right where to throw down markers, but I don't know what it did other than put "W" on my screen! I know the remap table on the drive is probably over-full (I'm sure it wasn't designed to compensate for 924 problem areas). I also know that FAT32 can compensate for an unlimited number of bad areas. If I had the patience and knew of a program that could detect delays and wouldn't try to "recover" data from blank sectors, I'd be using that...

So what does "scan" do if it doesn't really mark sectors? It only remaps them...?

edit: "Reallocated sectors count" is val: 97 / raw: 78. Can SMART show more than just 2- or 3-digit numbers? And what units are they in? o_O

Smart value can go upto 1000 and scan remap puts the bad sectors in to the G-list of the drive that means the sectors are repaired if the pass the advance remap option .

Okay.

Apparently MHDD won't do anything useful for me. The disk I'm now working with is completely OK except for a few patches of bad sectors at the top and bottom of the drive. It formats perfectly OK. However if I store a large file on this drive it will write over the bad sectors and make it completely unreadable. I want to map out these bad sectors so the filesystem will fragment the file around the bad clusters. I tried to use chkdsk and scandisk but they lock up when they encounter the first bad sector. I want to manually mark out these problem areas (learned via mhdd's scan) and continue using this drive.

Is there a program to manually map out bad sectors on a FAT drive? Google was absolutely NO help, providing a million links to programs for recovery (I have NO DATA on this drive, I just want to use it as STORAGE), and programs like mhdd that rely on the hard drive's remapping tables to "fix" bad sectors.

I just want to map them out of the file system. Is that at all possible???

Yes that is what i am saying it is possible use MHDD or victoria . I suggest u use victoria it is easier to use and it can be found from file.hddguru.com
u can use f4 to start scanning and use sequential scanning and with that use advance remap it can remove bad sector from the drive then u can use it normally .

Yup, I used Victoria and "Fujitsu Remap" (which I don't know WHAT it does thanks to its lacking documentation) and it worked great. Mapped about 250 bad sectors. Had to "makebad" a few very slow sectors that MHDD would do nothing to correct, though, then rescan that section... *oy*

Notepad on my laptop was a huge help... jotted down notes all over the place so I could run back and forth, scanning this section and that section... it took several passes of the scanner to finally grab all the bad sectors. But there we go, now I have a working 20gb drive again

... I still wish I could block them using the file system instead of remapping. I'd be glad to sacrifice a few KB here and there to be able to store files on it again... the solution I was using before was to partition-out the bad blocks! It would be so much more beneficial to have a way to write file system bad clusters...

Remap replaces the good sectors from the glist <which is a reserved area> with the bad sectors after remaping the sectors succesfully u can easily use the drive on the other hand if u mark the sectors like u r telling then u could use with only one file system but after u break the partition the bad sectors will come back but if u remap the bad sectors wont be back i hope u understand and if u did not .

Then use Nortron Disk Doctor good tool for marking bad sectors on a filesystem and lock the bad areas so as not to make them useable .

Hope that helps.

Norton has spiraled into a festering crap-heap of totally useless software that only calls basic Windows functions. Back in the old days (until, eh, I'd say the WinXP era) it was actually a useful suite... >.<

I know remapping gives you back your hard drive space but there are only so many remappable sectors available. How many are there, usually, anyway...?

There are two kinds :

1) With the Glist u can remap upto 800 bad sectors . all softwares like mhdd , hdd regenerator , victoria remap bad sectors in to glist .


2) Plist which can reallocate about 30,000 bad sectors depending on the drvie but to work with Plist u require Pc3000 or some other professional tool .