Hard Disk Drive Recovery

Badger007

Reputable
Aug 21, 2014
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4,510
Hi,

I'm in the fortunate position of having two identical computers. One was a second had "rebuild" that blue screened occasionally. Scan Disk usually found the dodgy sectors and it worked OK for a while

I decided to image my good computer and load it to the "dodgy" one. It crashed a couple of time initially but then worked really well for a week before blue screening again.

I've run VAIO HD diagnostics and it failed the funnel test and recomended running Scan Disk again. I did this and it found bad sectors it couldn't repair.

I ran the VAIO hardware diagnostics again and it failed the funnel test again.

If the hard drive knows which sectors are bad can I just reload the system image again and assume that it won't write anything to the damaged sector and therefore will work again?

Or is that just too simplistic!

Regards,

Jerry
 
It depends on what type of scan you do for errors.
The basic scan just tries to retrieve the data and rebuild it so its correct.
But when you get bad sectors you have to use the extended option to mark or flag bad sectors of the drive not to be used or windows ect to totaly ignore them, never use them. Most hard drives do this on the fly as a form of data protection if a sector is found to be too damaged, a spare is pulled from the extras provided.
The bad sector is flagged as data cannot be written to it.

Hard drives have a limited number of spare, or back up sectors to replace bad ones of the drive. X amount of sectors for redundancy, errors.
But once all of the spares are used up.
It`s time to buy a new HD sorry to say.
 

Badger007

Reputable
Aug 21, 2014
3
0
4,510


Hi Shaun, not sure I understand the arcitecture of a hard disk but if it 500GB and you are only using say 30GB max then can it not allocate some of the spare disk space that not being used?

I think what I'm trying to discern is:-

1) Having run scan disk will it have marked the bad sector and quarntined it so that if I reload the system image it won't write on that sector?

2) Is a sector failure indicative of a hard disk on the way out or is it just bad luck and the drive has plenty more life?

Is there any easy way to get a reasonably definitive answer to those two questions?

Cheers for the reply.

Jerry