Dealing with REALLY bad sectors?

[DreamDealer]

Having a big problem with the HD in my laptop at work. The drive in question is a 2.5", 30 GB Toshiba with NTFS file system.

It would appear that the drive has some bad sectors on it, so I'm planning to replace it. I'm just now trying to get as much data out as I can, unfortunately the process is getting stuck on the "My Documents" folder, which is what I REALLY need!

The drive basically hangs, I'm assuming, when it tries to access one or more bad sectors. The drive will just start making a repetitive sound (not so bad as the click of death though) and nothing short of a hard reset will get it going again. I have tried running "salvation HDD scan and repair" which successfully identifies 5 bad sectors. When it tries to repair them, the drive hangs. I have also tried MHDD32 which hangs during the scanning process as soon as it hits the first bad sector.

What I'm looking for is a suggestion for drive scan/repair software that might get past these bad sectors and mark them as bad without hanging. I've also been wondering if there is a way to manually mark bad sectors so they will just be skipped over and hopefully avoid hanging up the drive. I've resigned myself to the fact that I will lose some data, so if I could just somehow mark the bad sectors without attempting to restore the data, I think I would be satisfied.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[teengeek88]

You prolly think i am retarded, but if u want, as a last ditch effort, try putting it in the freezer for 20-30 minutes. I have even seen this work with drives that wont turn on man. good luck!

[DreamDealer]

You prolly think i am retarded, but if u want, as a last ditch effort, try putting it in the freezer for 20-30 minutes. I have even seen this work with drives that wont turn on man. good luck!

Nope! Don't think you're retarded at all... Actually I've already tried that since it has worked for me too in the past. I once got a lot of data off of a Quantum drive that was giving off the click of death by putting it in the freezer and then hitting it hard with freeze spray whenever it stared to act up.

Unfortunately though, the old freezer trick seems to have had no effect on this drive at all.

[paul9]

You could try Spinrite from http://grc.com but it won't be the cheap option.

[Smidley]

I'm trying the freezer method now on this drive which clicks. The BIOS recognizes it, but Windows can not successfully format it. I've tried other third-party utilities with no success.

I don't think the freezer will work because when I tip the drive back and forth, I can hear a loose piece. I don't think it's supposed to be like that.

[plot]

It seems bad sectors always lead a drive to hang. I got 2 drives with bad sectors. As soon a bad sector is accecced, both drives dissapear from the system - even with spinrites boot-cd. I tried several tools: Spinrite, Chkdsk, and some third one. After several trials with chkdsk, the tool finally did find and isolate the bad clusters without causing a hdd-switch-off. No idea why and how it suddenly worked. I searched seveal forums for an answer to "how to isolate bad clusters without problems". They all just recommend to buy a new HDD which usually is waste of money.

[chimo2012]

You can try PBD(Partition Bad Disk) to isolate bad sectors. Never hangs as far as I know.

[Taxmancometh]

This is an old thread, but I'll chime in. I have used HDD Regenerator with success. I ran it several times and I was finally able to back up my data without the hard drive stopping on a sector. It's pricy though, but if you put your hacker skills to work you can find a free copy. Dmitriy Primochenko Online

This works by booting a CD.