SpinRite - Bad Sectors?!

[Guest]

Hey guys i have question about spinrite and whether it maps bad sectors so windows will not write to any?

I bought a WD HDD (500gig) about 6 mths ago everything seemed fine with it until recently, i noticed that im starting to get alot of read/write errors and crc/checksum errors. i didnt start getting any errors till the drive was about 2/3 full. i decided to run spinrite (level 4) to see what was going on, its been about 65+ hrs and only 22% completed. Is it normal for it to take this long? on the status display it shows 2 U's (unrecovered) i assume those are the bad sectors so far?! Will spinrite map this bad sectors so windows will not write any data to them? i dont wanna waste all this time waiting for it to finish if i hafta run another task after..


thanks for any help!
Roy

 

[sub mesa]

No, it first wants to recover (read) the sectors, then will command the drive to use autonomous action to switch the bad sector for a reserve good one, and write the contents of the bad sector to there. But that can't happen until the data has been read.

To force a drive to switch bad sectors, write zeroes to the entire drive.