Marking sectors bad and unusable

[rinval]

so i have a weird question... im sure most are going to say replace the drive but that is not an option as the drive is not mine. ok so what i want to do is mark a section of the HDD as bad and unusable then shrink the maximum capacity of the drive to NOT include the section that is marked bad/unusable. as you can see it is a 240 GB hdd and there is a section about 10GB that have bad sectors but the rest of the drive reads and writes perfect. loosing the 10-20GB of platter area is no problem.. and there is no fear of lost data as i have already LLF to attempt to repair the sectors and have simply given up on repairing them. so my question is: is there any software that will allow to adjust the smart to mark the section of the drive as bad and unusable then resize the drive so it ignores that section all together?

Toshiba 240GB
MK2546GSX

 

[nhasian]

your thinking is incorrect. you cannot shrink the partition to avoid the bad sectors. you can simply do a low level scandisk to have the sectors marked as bad and then they will not be used. and yes you are correct you need to replace the drive. failure is imminent.

 

[rinval]

your thinking is incorrect. you cannot shrink the partition to avoid the bad sectors. you can simply do a low level scandisk to have the sectors marked as bad and then they will not be used. and yes you are correct you need to replace the drive. failure is imminent.

there are no partitions or MBR on the drive at all as it is unformated/unpartitioned. i wanted to be able to change the sector allocation to NOT include the damaged sectors. ie resizing the maximum capaicity of the disk (LBA) unformated from 488397168 sectors to say 460397168 sectors. but select the area that is damaged from a power surge as the unusable area.

 

[nhasian]

I have not used either tool but according to http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/150074-mark-hard-disk-bad-sectors.html

you can use tools like Crystaldiskinfo and HD tune to monitor bad sectors

 

[rinval]

both tools are great and HD tune even has a LLF function built in but does not allow for LBA manipulation or max capacity manipulation. they are more for monitoring and diagnosing that the drive is failing.

 

[geofelt]

Could you partition the drive and then use only the partition/s that work properly?
If you know the relative locations of the bad sectors, you could make a good enough guess.

 

[rinval]

....Smacks self in face... wow why didnt i think about that ... that might actually work for what im needing to do.

thanks

 

[geofelt]

 

[rinval]

Best answer selected by rinval.