Formatting a hard disk and handling of suspicious bad sectors
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From: Arno on 15 Feb 2010 10:04 In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Christian Franke <Christian.Franke(a)t-online.de> wrote: > Arno wrote: >> >> One thing you can try is to overwrite the disk/partition before >> a format. That would trigger the reallocation process for sectors >> known to be bad. The other option I see is using a "RAID edition" >> drive or one that does support time limited error recovery and set >> that. However I have no idea how to do that. >> > Some recent disks support the SCT Error Recovery Control (ERC) command > specified in ATA-8 ACS. The command allows to read and set the time limits. > It is supported by HDAT2 and by recent builds of smartctl. Ah, good to know. smartctl keeps getting better! Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans
From: Franc Zabkar on 15 Feb 2010 10:06 On Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:36:07 +0800, "Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps)" <toylet.toylet(a)gmail.com> put finger to keyboard and composed: >Right now, the Format process would retry again and again for long time >when a bad sector was hit. I don't want the process to retry, and just >mark it as bad. Makebad will do exactly what you want: http://files.hddguru.com/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Software/Makebad - Franc Zabkar -- Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
From: Arno on 15 Feb 2010 10:11 In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage "Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps)" <toylet.toylet(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> Get one of the many utilities that will write zeros to the entire HD, >> then repartition, then reformat (the high-level format). >> >> The other way to get a newly formatted HD is to buy a new one. > How could I tell the utility not to retry a bad sector to save time? I > want it to mark a sector as bad when it fails to read it on the FIRST > TIME (aka, NO MERCY)! The utility does not do the retry. The disk does. It is somewhat justified to do so as modern HDDs need more effort occasionaly than old ones did. Arno -- Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email: arno(a)wagner.name GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F ---- Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans
From: Rod Speed on 15 Feb 2010 14:03 Jonathan de Boyne Pollard wrote >>> Oh yes ... I remember DOS ... and floppy disks too! >>> Most of today's disks are way too big to do a DOS format without first setting up lots of logical partitions. >> Wrong. You can format the entire drive with one partition if you want. > ... as long as one is prepared to use partition types that most > versions of MS/PC/DR-DOS won't be able to cope with. Wrong. Modern versions of Win handle it fine. > This, of course, was M. Bryce's point. Not it was not. And he isnt an M. either. > And even then that is presuming that one's disc is below the 2TiB limit, Which it very likely is. > beyond which one has to do things like switch from the MBR partitioning scheme to the EFI partitioning scheme, which > no version of MS/PC/DR-DOS at all can cope with. Only fools run dinosaurs like that.
From: Rod Speed on 15 Feb 2010 14:06
Man-wai Chang to The Door (24000bps) wrote: >> And elsewhere, and more commonly, it's called a "high-level format", >> as opposed to a "low-level format". Were M. Toylet to put that >> phrase into xyr favourite WWW search engine, xe would find lots of >> information on the subject. > Yes, but why can't customers do a low-level format again AFTER YEARS of use? Because modern drives cant do one anymore. And they dont need to anyway, that was only useful with stepper motor head actuator drives that got sector jitter over time. There havent been any stepper motor head actuator drives for decades now. > Why should customers rely on SMART? Because its much better to have the drive deal with bad sectors. |