useful tool

[lucindrea]

ok a friend of mine told me he had a tool that fixed bad sectors on hard drives ( well technicly it remaps them ) better than anything he has used before ..
so i took an old drive i had from a show stopper , low level formated it with powerblast ( maxstors tool ) then did a full scan with it .. then patched it as a second drive on my 5040 .... over the next week i let my 5040 fill up so i could fill some of the space on the drive ..
well as soon as it got to about ( i can only guess ) the begining of the second drive , shows would get a few minor skips ( frozen picture , repeating sound ) here and their , and one show would allways freeze the unit.

so i took thedrive to my friends and ran the scanner on it .. the scanner found about 15 bad sectors and said it repaired them ...

brought the drive home and tried it again ... ALL the skips were gone , and even the one show that froze works now ... and none of the data was lost ( i cant even tell anything happened where the freeze part was ) ...

anyway , i thought i would mention this here as it seems to find stuff maxstors utility doesnt.

http://www.dposoft.net/regnow/hdd.html

[MIS-Man]

Danger Will Robinson Danger.

Getting bad sectors is a sign that you might want to consider budgeting for a new Hard Drive soon. Once you start to get them they will keep popping up more and more over time - you might save yourself the headaches.

[lucindrea]

hmm .. you do relise that their are bad sectors on every HD platter moments after they come out of the factory ... these are basicly all remaped at the factory and for the most part the drives are clean from then on ...
but it is impossable to make a 100% perfect platter , and even when it's good , the repeated changing of the magnetic feild of any given spot will eventully start to effect the coating of the drive , so a bad sector here and their over a year or 2 is normal ... and the 15 sectors the software found on a 6 year old drive is acctully fairly good IMHO.
if a drive is comming up with a sector a month , then ya it's going bad , but the simple fact is that most partition systems correct/re-map bad sectors it finds on the fly and it's normly not noticable .... it's when you get stuff the file system doesnt catch is when you run into problems.

[kurhurdler]

I've used that in the past. Its a good tool if your HD is not already going south. In my experience though, it probably only gave me another 3 days of life out of my failing HD.

[Jeff D]

lucindrea, yes every disc has problem areas, but... generally speaking a drive problem, is a drive problem, is a drive problem. It's safe to say that things could be going south. The best advice is to keep a very close eye on the drive. I'd move to a new drive as soon as this drive shows any other problem.

[lucindrea]

well it's an old "throw away" drive i had laying around that i used just to test out this program ( one i dont need on the 5040 anyway as i have another 80G i was useing before i did this test )

just wanted to share a decent program , and everyone telling to me to get a new drive :rolleyes: