Hi everybody,

I have this 30Gb notebook hard drive that is unusable because it has a large amount of bad clusters(maybe really bad or maybe good but unreadable due to other problems).

The situation (also seen with MHDD) is : For each 50-70 Mb of good space there are other 50-100 Mb of slow sectors (they need more than 500ms to get access, with MHDD there are many red rectangles).

I tried a low level format, but it is impossible to reach the end because of this high number of slow sectors. (It need 3-4 hours to pass from 0% to 1%).

I tries to use the scan command of MHDD selecting the flag that erases slow sectors, but at each scan it still find the slow sectors.

Is there a way to make this hard drive use only the good space and avoid accessing the bad space? How could I do?

Please let me know, thank you, bye.

if the bad sectors are all over it , i dont think so , but if that was for a certain part of it , lets say if that is for the first quarter or the last third of it , this may be possible

The drive has a weak/failing head.

Don't waste your time tying to fix

Hi, the bad clusters are on the entire disk, there is no large good spaces. My impression is that the more I use it, the more it become unusable.
Some times it isn't recognized by the bios.
Do you think it is possible to change heads taking them from a 6gb 2,5 ibm travelstar hard drive? Does different sizes of hard drives mount different kinds of heads?
Thank you,bye.

pcimage i right : bad head. And one more thing : too many weak sectors....

No way to do the replacement like you asked. Head replacement is too difficult for this 2.5" HDDs (especially from different type).

Just not worth it to fix....

Exactly, no point in swap head just to repair drive. Maybe if you wanted data, but not just for repair. Waste of time, as drive will fail again, SOON!