Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

On my HP DV9000 i suddenly wasn't able to open a folder. The drive would keep churning and churning, but with the access light off. The system became unresponsive.

I knew exactly what that meant so i booted HDD Regenerator and let it run. No trouble till the very end (99.34%), and then every single sector shows up as bad. It's done 336 already. With like 100.000 more to go...

Now, the data in that folder isn't critical. The data on the rest of the drive however... The drive is 250GB and it's a WD IIRC. Well, at least the bads are only at the end of the drive. That means i can simply shrink the partition a hundred megs or so and keep using it.

[Pyr0Beast]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

Yes, I've done that before and it works.

Just make a 'dead' partition on the end of it, or just make a partition up to that 95 (Save some % for error margin)

[digge]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

I wouldn't trust a drive that had those kinds of errors. Would be fine to use as extra storage for unimportant stuff and such. But if its a computer you use make backups and swap it. There is a risk that more and more of the drive will die with time.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

It is my main laptop, but i have important stuff backed up every week. It also needs a new mainboard... I'll do an overhaul once i'm done with exams at uni, then buy an enclosure and turn this drive into an external.

[mattbrad2]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

Not sure about HDD regenerator but MHDD can force the drive to remap those bad sectors so they'll never be used again. Its certainly useful when that sector is at the beginning of the drive or a few are spread out and you can't really clip the drives capacity.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

MHDD doesn't work with SATA drives in AHCI mode. I use Victoria, does pretty much the same thing.

HDD Regenerator actually fixes the sectors but if the drive really is damaged they come back. With the 400 or so sectors it did on my laptop drive till i stopped it, the folder i was unable to access came back. I copied the stuff in it on a flash drive, and restarted it. I'm curious on how many it'll find bad till the end.

[smason]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

A drive with that many errors should only be used for the following:

Doorstop
Paperweight
Target Practice

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

I have a 120GB Maxtor i use as an extra drive in my main rig. It used to have over 3500 bad sectors spread all over the place. I have also physically opened the drive and confirmed a scratched platter - whatever PSU this had been running on wasn't too kind to it. In fact it had so many that the SMART failed after i let Victoria remap all of them. Probably a buffer overflow. The drive has been holding fine for half an year. I do however only use it for movies.

[Toasty]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

+1 for HDD Regenerator.

Has saved my bacon many times.

[ala_borbe]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

Hdd reg is a miracle but sometimes can not fix certain drives ("drive not ready" error). Then i use HDAT2 for substitution. Hope it helps you also

[unlockdev]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

+10 for HDD Regenerator

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

Ah, didn't post the final update on my laptop. It did another 140 sectors till the end, bringing the total to about 450-500. The drive is fully functional now.

There are however exceptions for HDD Regenerator as you noted as well, on the aforementioned Maxtor drive it would say it fixed them but they would come back at the next reboot. Only a remap using Victoria (removing those sectors entirely from use) brought the drive in usable condition.

But hey - that Maxtor drive wouldn't even let Windows boot when i first got it.

[bigbeark]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

I have a 120GB Maxtor i use as an extra drive in my main rig. It used to have over 3500 bad sectors spread all over the place. I have also physically opened the drive and confirmed a scratched platter - whatever PSU this had been running on wasn't too kind to it. In fact it had so many that the SMART failed after i let Victoria remap all of them. Probably a buffer overflow. The drive has been holding fine for half an year. I do however only use it for movies.

Amazing! I thought you needed a dustproof room to open up a HDD!
You opened it up, reassembled it, and it still works!

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

I actually even cleaned the platter with a cloth dipped in paint thinner before i closed it back... and hey look it still runs. And it's actually quite fast till it hits the areas with lots of remapped sectors.

I have a history of doing that - i first took apart a 10GB drive in my old computer and started it up like that. It died after a few minutes, not because of dust, but because a piece of plastic i forgot to remove made its way into the heads. It didn't have anything important on it tho. I had a 40GB Maxtor die on me - now that one had lots of good stuff that i haven't recovered to this day... oh well live and learn, never trust Maxtor.

I also fixed a friend's stuck 250GB Seagate (the drive took a fall, motor got stuck), by taking it apart and giving the spindle a nudge. It started spinning and has worked fine since.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

I can't imagine opening any hdd up and it still working without errors, they are filled with mostly vacuum and some inert gases. They require a class 10 clean room during manufacturing, any less, and a single particle of anything, can get caught on the head. Doing what you're doing to recover data from a hdd is actually quite genus, but continuously using that hard drive just freaks me out

and in the shop, whenever we have a hard drive that starts timing out on sectors, we find its usually only a short matter of time till it fails completely

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

All hard drives have a breather hole so they couldn't be possibly filled with any type of gas because it would get out.

[momaka]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

I have a 120GB Maxtor i use as an extra drive in my main rig. It used to have over 3500 bad sectors spread all over the place.

Sounds like the 40 GB DiamondMax Plus 8 I have. The drive had a about 1500 bad sectors when I got it. I did a low level format on it (with LLF tool), and the number of bad sectors sky-rocketed. After the LLF process was complete, the hard drive was no longer recognized by Windows.
Never heard of HDD regenerator, but now it makes me curious if I can fix that Maxtor (not like I need it or anything). I do have a number of other hard drives that are bad in some way. Will definitely give this a try.

----
Personally, I've never had a hard drive go bad on me. Kind of ironic, really, because I do have quite a few Deskstars and Travelstars in my computers - I think all of them are the affected "Deathstar" models, too. They all have at least a few bad sectors, but work just fine nonetheless.
The bad hard drives I actually got from work, along with a bag full of other drives (some of them were quite decent).

they are filled with mostly vacuum and some inert gases.

The Th3_uN1Qu3 is correct - there are no inert gases in the hard drive, just plain old air that we breathe.
Also, if hard drives were "filled" with vacuum, they wouldn't work. The spinning motion of the platters actually creates an air stream close to them on which the heads can ride on. This is what allows the heads to get so close to the platters without actually ever touching them. Some hard drives (if not most, nowadays) have a mechanism that won't allow the voice coil and arm to move unless the drive's platters reach a certain RPM.

[Pyr0Beast]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

>>Personally, I've never had a hard drive go bad on me. Kind of ironic, really, because I do have quite a few Deskstars and Travelstars in my computers - I think all of them are the affected "Deathstar" models, too. They all have at least a few bad sectors, but work just fine nonetheless.


You should really get a job in modern datacenters )

I had a perfectly healthy drive fail with all my data. Whopie do. I even went to do a full surface scan on it - 0 bad sectors. Next day - Pooof !

[Uranium-235]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

hm I don't remember where I heard that. but the air inside it is not the normal 'air' we breathe. most breather holes appearently have a carbon filter

[Pyr0Beast]

Re: Failed sectors at end of laptop drive

Yes. It is clean air (no dust), even partially dry air, otherwise, nothing speciall.