Hard drive has a bad block: HELP!!!!!

[spoogenet]

One of my hardrives (my only IDE one) has a bad block somewhere out there. I know that one MP3 file is in this block, but not sure what else is in it.

Whenever I try to access this file, I get lots of errors in my Eventlog, Atapi timeouts, etc. When I try to run the disk error-check utility, it just plugs and chugs while filling up my Eventlog with tons of error messages. I let it run for an hour, only to get an hour's worth of error messages.

So, on to the real question....how can I get around this??? Does anybody know of a good disk utility that will allow me to tag the bad block as bad and move on with my life??? At the moment it is very frustrating that I cannot do much with it.

Thank you very very very much for any helpful info.

b
(btw...what happened to our beloved forums? i'm gone for a few months and they change lots.....)

[Nuno]

Format x: will do the trick... Or a less drastic solution, I think norton utilities disk doctor deals well with that kind of situations. At least I remember to have recovered a hdd with ot. Of course it died a couple of months after...

[spoogenet]

Hmm, doesn't sound very promising for me then....btw, for all that it matters, this is in Win2k.

Grrrr....everything worked fine till i moved......

b

[Reverend Maynard]

Formatting would certainly suck. If I were you I would try Spinrite from the ever brilliant, albeit slightly fanatic at times, Steve Gibson over at www.grc.com. Sorry, but I don't know how to make that a clickable link. It's a fantastic little program and it should take care of the problem with minimal, if any, data loss.

[Gurm]

Sadly, I have some bad news.

1. If you are using NTFS you will have to reformat the drive. Unless someone has written some incredibly brilliant utility in the last few months that I'm unaware of, nobody makes a bad block recover-ificator for NTFS that works any better than the built-in, or Norton Disc Doctor. If you've tried those and you're running NTFS you're SOL.

2. If you have a bad block AT ALL on a modern drive, bin it. If it's been less than 3 years, call the manufacturer and get it replaced -they will take your credit card # (no charge, just to make sure you don't stiff them) and ship you a new drive airmail. You swap the data and send the old drive back. All on their ticket.

3. If you are using FAT32, you can in fact just run Norton Disc Doctor (I wouldn't give Steve Gibson any of my money for any of the utilities he has available now - Spinrite is mostly a low-level formatting tool and is fairly useless nowadays)... and take care of the problem.

- Gurm

[spoogenet]

On that partition of that drive, I'm running FAT....probably FAT16, I doubt it's FAT32. This drive is an old Quantum Fireball dating back to late 1996. The file system may be as old as that, or I could have done a format as recently as 1998 on it. I basically use it to hold a few games and a few MP3's. It's about 986 MB parition on a 3.2 GB drive.

I would like to bin the drive and switch to SCSI, but finding SCSI UW devices these days is a pain, and I don't feel like updating my SCSI controller at the moment to U160 or whatever the newest junk on the market is.

I guess I will have to go out and get me a copy of Norton for Win2k. Too bad I don't get student discounts anymore.

Thanks a lot for the helpful info.

b

[Kosh Naranek]

Yes .. SPINRITE is worth a try !

Amazing what you can do with 96 KB !

[Jammrock]

Run Norton Disk Doctor on it. NT uses a slightly modified version of FAT called, vFAT. So unless the util is specifically made for NT, I wouldn't try it...unless the partition was made using a Win95 boot disk or Partition Magic (or the like). But since the drive hasn't been touched in 5 years, I doubt anyone really knows what util made the partition.

The Jammrock recommended steps to PC recovery are:

1) BACKUP YOUR %*#@ DATA!!!! If you lose an MP3 or two, you can easily get them back elsewhere.

2) Fdisk and format the drive.

3) Run Norton Disk Doctor on it. Make sure to run a thurough check and let the surface scan complete.

4) If NDD reports bad blocks/clusters after a fresh format...trash the drive and get a nice new IBM 20-60 GB 60GXP monster...or whatever work will get you (if you're running NT ay home, seek professional help).

5) If no bad blocks/clusters are found, restore your data and get on with life.

Jammrock

[Jorden]

Wouldn't there be a disk-mfr own program that would be able to revive the drive? I can't check it since the Maxtor site seems down (Maxtor took over Quantum).

I don know I have a program for my Fujitsu drive to set it up and repair errors on the drive (FAT only). Might be one out there for the Quaxtor as well.

Jord.

[Technoid]

Originally posted by Gurm
Sadly, I have some bad news.

1. If you are using NTFS you will have to reformat the drive. Unless someone has written some incredibly brilliant utility in the last few months that I'm unaware of, nobody makes a bad block recover-ificator for NTFS that works any better than the built-in, or Norton Disc Doctor. If you've tried those and you're running NTFS you're SOL.

2. If you have a bad block AT ALL on a modern drive, bin it. If it's been less than 3 years, call the manufacturer and get it replaced -they will take your credit card # (no charge, just to make sure you don't stiff them) and ship you a new drive airmail. You swap the data and send the old drive back. All on their ticket.

3. If you are using FAT32, you can in fact just run Norton Disc Doctor (I wouldn't give Steve Gibson any of my money for any of the utilities he has available now - Spinrite is mostly a low-level formatting tool and is fairly useless nowadays)... and take care of the problem.

- Gurm

Not if you live in Sweden and has a IBM!

Called IBM and asked them!

"You have to ship it to us, then we ship it to our nearest repaire shop somwhere in europe, then the poke inside it for a couple of months and then if they find something wrong with it you get a refurbished in another months "


And don't tell me it was because I had a OEM drive!

For them to know that I would hawe to give them some serialnumbers - right?

Wich I did not do!

[Gurm]

You didn't push hard enough... or... you need to call IBM USA.

They never mention the rapid swap until you ask about it.

But it might be a USA-only thing.

- Gurm

[Jammrock]

I've done the rapid swap with Western Digital before. Never had to with my IBM's *knock on wood*.

Jorden,

The utility that Fujitsu uses is probably the same thing NDD uses, just not as advanced. If you have access to NDD, use it. If not you can try one provided by the drive manufacture.

Jammrock

[spoogenet]

Why seek professional help for NT at home? Last time I checked NT had no security problems, was 100% stable, never corrupted any files, and blue screens....what are those?

Here's another question I meant to ask in my previous posts:
What is the heirarchy of the drive, i.e., how do blocks relate to sectors, clusters, etc etc etc?

b