[SOLVED] Hard Disk Bad Sectors Help

sunnieside-up · 11-29-2011, 03:52 AM

Hi All,

I have an external USB hard disk, partitioned in NTFS and Ext4, but when I try to copy off some areas of the ext4 part, the hard disk just stops reading properly and I get I/O errors. I ran badblocks, and it found a ton of bad sectors on the ext4 partition... and a few on the NTFS as well. What is the best way to fix this? Is there any way to recover the data on the corrupted portion? Thanks!

godh8sme · 11-29-2011, 04:14 AM

The best way I have found is a program called SpinRite its not foolproof but I have had a lot of success with it. You can find it a grc.com

sunnieside-up · 11-29-2011, 02:33 PM

Thanks, I'll look into it! It looks like a data recovery thing, but once I recovered the data and want to reuse the hard disk, how do I fix or block the bad sectors?

TobiSGD · 11-29-2011, 03:18 PM

You simply don't. If you have a massive amount of bad blocks that means the disk is dying, you will get more and more bad blocks on it. Backup/recover all you can, then replace the disk. Using it any further is of no use at all, you will loose data.

godh8sme · 11-30-2011, 12:37 AM

SpinRite will mark the sectors as bad and remove them from use. But as stated above if there are a lot of them I would only use the disk as a secondary or temporary use disk as it is likely to be dying.

H_TeXMeX_H · 11-30-2011, 05:21 AM

I agree with TobiSGD, the drive will die very soon.

Spinrite is not a good solution, IMO. Yeah, it will mark bad sectors, and then you may believe that the drive is ok, but it will fail suddenly and Spinrite won't be able to help.

What I would do is I would either get all the important data off ASAP, or I would image the drive to a larger drive if you have a lot of important data on it.

sunnieside-up · 11-30-2011, 08:06 PM

Alright, thank you all for your help!