External hard drive problem, please help!

[plam]

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Hello,

I have an Apacer AC202 500GB external HD. As in one point of time my drive stop working properly I decided to reformatted. I wanted to do it through the device manager and not the quick format but not along after the formatting process start its seems that the HD follow asleep and a message formatting cannot be complete pop up. If I do a quick format there isn`t any problem and the HD is ready for a use in a seconds but I`m sure that I`ve got some bad sectors and I`m afraid that the quick format will not fix them. I hope that someone could give me an advise of what to do. By the way my laptop is using windows 7 as OS.

Thanks Pam

[stroyal]

Welcome to TechIMO!
I assume 2 posts was a mistake.

Quick format, just re-wrights the index, so no it would not find bad sectors.

Seems to me the last time I played with a hard drive with bad sectors, I had to go back to a win98 format, to mark bad sectors, as I don't think XP or newer dose that.
I think it just tries to repair.

The hard drive manufacturer, has a downloadable disk, that will test the drive. Unless it is one of the crappy brands.
This is a very accurate test, and can be trusted.

I don't thing anybody tries to recover a failing disk anymore, but another option that works, is watch at what percentage the format stops.

Say it is 75%.
Then partition the drive to 70%, and leave the rest unpartitioned. I had a drive last for years after doing that.
Of course, if format fails @10%you would loose 90% of the drive.

Really nothing I would do today.

[plam]

Hi ,

Thanks for your replay. Yes I wasn`t sure where exactly shall I put my post and by mistake I`ve done 2 post.

I did a quick formatting to the drive and after I scans the hard disk for errors and attempts to fix them and surprisingly the scan worked this time. Shall I assume that the drive is fixed now?!

[stroyal]

I don't trust any scan, except the one provided by the hard drive manufacturer.

[plam]

I didn`t found any manufacturer scans . I believe that I`ll just go and buy a better HD and do the right formatting from the start.