HDD bad sector repair software? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / repair

author: abdolah
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2024, 11:53:45 am
content: Hi guys I was looking for a good software to regenerate a couple of bad sector on my HDDI have Seagate st8000nm0045-1rl112 , 8TB drive and I can't initialize it , I did a scan and found some bad sectorsIf you know a good software to resolve this please let me knowThanks for your time

author: coromonadalix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2024, 01:06:04 pm
content: maybe this one can help5.37https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/victoria_for_windows.htmlhttps://hdd.by/?download=1&kccpid=916&kcccount=https://hdd.by/Victoria/Victoria537.zipnormally i would check S.M.A.R.T statushttps://www.majorgeeks.com/content/page/how_to_deal_with_bad_disk_sectors.htmlbut a 8tb driveis it under warranty ? they are not old ?

author: abdolah
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2024, 01:41:35 pm
content: Thanks for the suggestion I will try themYes it's not under warrantyWarranty ended in 2023

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2024, 01:46:46 pm
content: TheHDSentinelsurface scan you can track if the amount if bad sectors increases.This will indicate a non fixable problem.

author: CaptDon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 02:31:58 am
content: Don't bother restoring sectors marked bad. You have 8TB, do you really need the space lost to bad sectors? Why can't you initialize the drive? are the bad sectors in the boot sector or fat table area? Probably write it off as unreliable, I wouldn't trust my data being stored on it.

author: edpalmer42
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:10:41 am
content: Quote from: abdolah on September 30, 2024, 11:53:45 amYou can't 'regenerate' a bad sector. A modern hard drive automatically detects a bad sector and swaps in a spare sector. If the drive runs out of spare sectors, it's time to trash it.Post a screen cap from CrystalDiskInfo or similar and we may be able to give you more definitive suggestions.

author: coromonadalix
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 09:59:18 am
content: yes normally flagged bad and wont be re-used, softs may be of little helpnormally S.m.a.r.t related softwares will read the hdd infos, and you can check the bad sectors amount, if they grow, you have a drive who slowly die and can not be trusted for archival purposesdo check for firmwares updates, Seagate had a bunch of problems in the past on older drives, and when you did flash, the content where lost ...i ditched Seagate for that

author: abdolah
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 01:13:24 pm
content: I wanna know how to cut the bad section off

author: squadchannel
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 01:43:48 pm
content: "cut the bad section off" No. can't.Bad sectors cannot be recovered. No matter what you do, you cannot.When the HDD firmware detects a bad sector, it will reprogram the HDD to avoid that sector and use an reallocated sector. (Reallocated Sectors Count).Just that. The space for reallocated sectors is limited. When that space runs out, bad sectors accumulate (Uncorrectable Sector Count) and eventually become just garbage.HDDs with bad sectors should not be used.According to one survey, I have seen that HDDs with bad sectors have a 50-60% chance of having more bad sectors.ps.There used to be a software called "HDD Regenerator". It was a magical software to recover bad sectors.Well, the bad sectors reappeared immediately.

author: Retep
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 02:27:11 pm
content: There is a product called "SpinRite" (https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm) which makes some claims in this area. It could very well be snake oil; I've no personal experience with this product.

author: DavidAlfa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 02:31:42 pm
content: Some years back I used HDD regenerator to recover a drive. After that it formatted and wrote/read data correctly...Then some weeks later I tried to read it again and nope!!Bad sectors are unreliable, don't use them!What I've done many times is to map the bad sectors, then make the partitions skipping the bad area plus a margin of 1gig, some drives worked for years without issues, but never rely on that drive for anything important!

author: Jeroen3
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 02:44:13 pm
content: One thing to know is that the operating system has no control over bad sectors. The disk firmware will deal with it.When trying to read these sectors it will be terribly slow because the disk will try and try and try.Some special kit, such as PC3000 may be able to skip these, this is both specialized hardware and software.An S.M.A.R.T long disk test also does as surface scan andshouldcorrect for them. As in, reallocate to one of the hundreds of spares.HDSentinel has a Reinitialize disk surface feature.QuoteAnyway if you have more than dozens, the disk is probable EOL.

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 03:47:40 pm
content: SMART self test doesn't reallocate anything. In fact, it stops immediately on first error. And (at least on modern Seagate disks) it starts with testing known bad sectors and usually stops there.The rules are simple. If you try to read a bad sector, the disk will retry many times (anywhere from a fraction of a second to many seconds, maybe minutes), then return an error if it still can't get good data from it. If a bad sector is luckily recovered on read, or if its contents are replaced by a write, the disk will try to write the sector and read it back. If that works out OK, it will consider it repaired. If it doesn't, the sector will be reallocated to spare area.If you don't care about the data currently there, you can simply continue using the disk as if nothing happened. If you continue having problems with reading back newly written data, you know the disk is not reliable. But you already have problems, so you know it anyway. That being said, such disk may still be useful if you have other copies of the data.You can test a disk by writing it from start to end and reading back. This should also reset the "Current Pending Sector" count to zero, and it may or may not increase "Reallocated Sector Count".Quote from: DavidAlfa on October 01, 2024, 02:31:42 pmThis makes sense for localized damage, and I have done it once for a friend. Last time I heard, the disk was still in service after several years. But it won't help if you have random errors in random places due to some mechanical or electronic problem. Particularly, if a disk keeps creating bad sectors and then repairing them by simple overwriting without reallocation, and then creating new bad sectors elsewhere, you just know not to expect much from it.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 03:57:10 pm
content: I'll reiterate what some others here have said.Once upon a time "bad sectors" were a normal part of harddrives. Your OS had to notice them, mark them as bad and work around them. This was called "low level formatting" in some places (although this term is sometimes used to mean something else again).Then some time (in the 1990's?) this all changed. It became the drive's responsibility to detect and deal with bad sectors. The firmware on the harddrive would swap them for spares, so the OS would only ever see a perfect disk with no bad sectors. To allow this the disk would be a few % bigger than what you see in your OS ("over-provisioning"). You no longer "low level format" or "initialise" disks, just partition them and "quick" format a filesystem instead.This means that if a modern drive is reporting bad sectors: something VERY bad is happening. So bad that it has run out of space sectors, which almost always means you have an accelerating problem of many more bad sectors than you can see. A drive will only report errors to the OS if it has run out of options.

author: wraper
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:04:13 pm
content: Victoria or MHDD (run from DOS).

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:08:45 pm
content: Quote from: Whales on October 01, 2024, 03:57:10 pmNo. Getting read errors and seeing non-zero "Current Pending Sectors" simply means that there are unreadable sectors which the drive will not touch until you overwrite them, because there is always chance that a future read may recover them successfully.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:09:58 pm
content: I'll also add that software claiming to "repair" bad sectors has always been dubious.When a drive writes a sector (which might be 512bytes, 4096bytes or sometimes secretly larger in modern SSDs) it actually writes more than that number of bits physically to disk. Eg it might write 600 bytes for a 512byte sector, but don't quote me on the exact numbers. This gives it the ability to add error-correcting codes. A few bits can go bad, but the sector's data is then still fully recoverable.This is 100% necessary because even normal reads and writes will lead to bad bits on modern SSDs and HDDs. There are pushing their mediums right to the limit of density, bitflips are common, but error correcting codes make this manageable.When a bad sector is encountered they might move it elsewhere or perhaps even keep it in the same spot (if the errors are minor or disappear if read a few more times), the exact algorithms are at the discretion of the drive maker. As long as they can guarantee no data loss for the warranty period they are keeping up their end of the deal.If a sector has so many failed bits that the error correcting code is useless, then there is nothing the drive can do to get your data back. At this point it reports a failed read to the OS. Your data is lost permanently. There is nothing that third party software can do here that the drive firmware has not already tried (and with much better insight into the disk's low level layout).This failed sector is only bad transiently. If you write to it then the drive silently handles relocating it elsewhere or similar. It should not stay broken after being written to, unless something is horribly wrong with the drive.If the drive is reporting lots of bad sectors then shit has hit the fan. Its error correcting codes are failing everywhere, it can't see a clean view of its own platters/flash/media and its whole worldview is falling apart.

author: Whales
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:14:04 pm
content: Quote from: magic on October 01, 2024, 04:08:45 pm(boldemphasis mine)EDIT: I"m talking about read errors that make it to the OS, not read errors that are silently and internally fixed by the drive.That's still very bad. A read error making it to your OS means the drive has already tried several times and given up. If those bits are part of your OS or software then you will see crashes; and if part of your files then broken files. All guarantees from modern software are thrown in the bin the moment any part of their data is unreadable.There aresometypes of drives that are tweaked to give up very easily (surveillance disks, where delays from retrying are worse then accepting a few failed operations); but for everything else you should treat read errors that make it to your OS as "something VERY bad is happening".

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:17:27 pm
content: Quote from: Retep on October 01, 2024, 02:27:11 pmIf you value your data, stay away from this prehistoric pile of excreta.Deconstructing SpinRite:https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2929

author: magic
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:30:17 pm
content: Quote from: Whales on October 01, 2024, 04:09:58 pmIf you care about the data, there is software which will keep retrying (even for weeks) and it helps in some cases.Quote from: Whales on October 01, 2024, 04:14:04 pmObviously it's bad, but it doesn't mean that the disk has run out of spare sectors. Nor does it necessarily mean that it's a write-off in every case, sometimes there are cost vs reliability tradeoffs to be made and sometimes the cheap option works out OK.

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: October 01, 2024, 04:40:08 pm
content: Quote from: magic on October 01, 2024, 04:30:17 pmThe only good DIY tools that I'm aware of are HDDSuperclone, OpenSuperClone (a fork of HDDSuperclone), and GNU ddrescue. These tools will recover all the easy sectors on the first pass and then try for the more difficult sectors on subsequent passes.