Answers: hardware failure - Where does hard drive save the bad sector count number?

adam

I want to repair a hard disk that has 652 bad sectors and when I use HDD regenerator, it reports that bad sectors were fixed, but when I try to install Windows or Linux, the hard drive doesn't accept that, so I tried to use a program called Disk. That program reports that nothing happens to the hard drive and it still has 652 bad sectors.

So what can I do, and where exactly does he hard disk save the bad sectors count number?

gabrign

When there is bad sectors on a HD there is no much you can really do, because is a physical problem over the disk surface. When one hard disk found those problems (on any system), try to recover the information of that bad sectors , if not possible, the sector is marked like bad and is not used again, reallocating the rest info inside on another place on the HD. All this is transparent for the user. Those programs you use try to make some operations like force the read over that bad sectors, if the HD can "recover them" quitting the bad sector if the read is positive. There is no physical touch between the heads of a HD and the surface, so can't do a physical repair or something similar. When a program use the term "fix" refer to mark those sectors like bad for not be used again.

Anyway a hard disk with several account of bad sectors is a bad signal, not store important files inside, usually appears more bad sectors.

Thiago F Macedo

The best you'll be able to go with this defective hdd is to zero-fill it analyzing if it is still usable with the output of badblocks.

# On Unix
badblocks -s -w -t 0xff /dev/sd?

Generally when the number is too large (or growing) the disk will just die if you continue to try it.

Be aware that hard disk fixes is one of the most obscure subjects in computer engineering. If you aren't James Bond of electronics and magnetic disks, dont waste your time.

If you really want to, I have this links to share with you (dont be optmistic):)

Araer

Just for the answer, the SMART info is saved in the Service Area (SA) of the hard disk. Basically out of bounds, except for specific tools.

mft - Hard drive RAW but not empty

hard-drive mft hard-drive-recovery

Nathan Taylor

I've been having some weird difficulties with one of the hard drives in my system and I replaced it yesterday (warranty) in hopes I could solve them, but the problem has followed me to the new drive. Basically, Windows has been spontaneously getting I/O errors when reading from that device (internal 1TB Western Digital) and then it will mark the drive inactive and disconnect from it. When this has happened before usually all I needed was a reboot or two to be back in order, but this time it isn't working.

Windows sees that the disk is connected (as does my other computer) but it indicates that the partition type is "RAW". If I open the disk in a utility I have (Active Kill Disk) and press "Scan" it performs a logical read of the disk and tells me that the disk is NTFS with 309gb free. Furthermore, I can see my intact file structure inside of Active Kill Disk.

The first thing that comes to mind is that perhaps the MFT got funked up, but I'm not expert on these sorts of things and I'm dealing with 600gb of valuable data. What are some safe things I can try to get the disk properly detected again?

Update

I've now scanned the disk with TestDisk which also confirms the presence of my lost NTFS partition. When I attempted to do a deep scan of the drive it told me both the MFT and backup MFT were inaccessible. I'm now in the processing of copying all of the data off the disk with GetDataBack for NTFS. I wonder though if there's a less complicated fix though? One that doesn't require recreating the entire disk structure.

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hardware failure - Where does hard drive save the bad sector count number?