Bad Allocation Units

[awrobinsonii]

Is it possible to repair bad allocation units on a harddrive??

[Keefe]

I know that Western Digital hard drives have a utility that you can use to "skip" over the bad sectors on a hard disk.

[rod]

Is it possible to repair bad allocation units on a harddrive??


depends how they where created if a util like partion magic caused themthen yes, otherwise no.however windows ignores then when readind\ writing to your hard drive run scandisk!

[awrobinsonii]

Well I didn't find a way to repair the units but did find some good advice to just partition around them. I got lucky for a temp fix until I get a new hdd. SPAMThe last half of the drive had the bad units so I partitioned the first half and it works fine now. Hopfully the bad units don't infect the good half of the partition. Thanks for all the or the two pieces of advice given.

[Hpub_Val]

from what i have learned is a low level format should fix them i think* maxtor has one it was a pain to do it cause you have to find the right prog for your hd...

and i do belive scandisk surce scan does like lable them as bad and it will avoide them...

i know while formating it tries to like fix or something im not quite sure...

but i think you ahve to do a low level which means earsing hole hd it like writes 0's to the hole hd...

hmm you dont have to do that right away... but you could use your hd's util diagnostics that might tell you if you have to or not or what is wrong...

[wizbones]

Hey all,

If you have bad sectors on your hard drive running a thorough scan disk will mark them so they are not used. You do not need to format your drive if you only have a small percentage of bad sectors. Once they are marked they will be skipped over as mentioned above.

If there are a large percentage of bad sectors then you'll want to do a low level format for sure.

Low level formatting destroy 100% of the data on the harddrive so be sure this is what you want to do.

Disk Manager can be downloaded from seagate at http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

This has two low-level format options, partitioning options and high level format options. Low level performs a track by track initialization for te entire space of the drive but does not spare bad sectors. Zero fill writes zeros in each sector up the capacity of the drive and does clean up some file defects.

Zero fill and low level basically accomplish the same task. The software above that you download will create a boot disk to use for this process. Once your done you'll want to reboot with your DOS bootdisk FDISK, Partition, and then format your drive and you're ready to install your OS.

Just wanted to throw my 1.5 cents in SPAM;)