In the year 2008 i brought an Acer Aspire 5930G, it came with a WD3200BEVT which has started to show Bad Sectors not so long ago, some captures:
HD Tune Pro: WDC WD3200BEVT-22ZCT0 Error Scan
Scanned data : 319 gB
Damaged Blocks : 0.4 %
Elapsed Time : 2:04:28
1 Error at 10042 MB (LBA 20567532)
2 Error at 10042 MB (LBA 20567660)
3 Error at 12311 MB (LBA 25213528)
4 Error at 12311 MB (LBA 25213656)
5 Error at 13048 MB (LBA 26724348)
6 Error at 16840 MB (LBA 34490358)
7 Error at 17632 MB (LBA 36112026)
8 Error at 17632 MB (LBA 36112154)
9 Error at 32680 MB (LBA 66929084)
My first question is, Is there some program which allows me to mark those bad sectors as inaccessible so that the OS will not hang while trying to read/write to them? (ie, Windows Atapi error with Event ID 11)
In case there is no such program, which HD(s) do you recommend me to replace it with? I just found “Acronis True Image WD Edition” and it seems an easy task to perform a 1:1 clone (by sectors) of my current disk, so that after a few hours of cloning i can get everything back on a new disk, even a bigger one, right? I’m considering a 500GB min rather than another 320GB, and also considering if it should be 5400 or 7200… what do you think?
Thank you so much for your time and recommendation(s).
PS: Btw, i wonder what will do Acronis with those bad sectors when performing a 1:1 clone (?)
Hi you can try chkdsk its part of windows and it will attempt to recover bad sectors it really marks them bad and uses a spare sector to replace it. As for cloning the drive with bad sectors you can only try it and see what happens. The best drive is of course a Wd black scorpio 7200 rpm 500 gig drive with 16 mb of cache. Theres nothing like a fresh install of windows on a new drive to make things run great.
I’ve used chkdsk several times already, initially by using the /B switch but since that one takes ages im just using /R which seems to do a ncie job, however… the bad sectors are still there and errors (the mentioned event 11) occurs again and again (from time to time, though - let’s say every five days by average)
So, chkdsk may be able to recover the data on a bad sector, but theres the same pain if other data can be written again on it/them. I think another posibility is to locate the exact files on those sectors and then rename and write-protect them, which is something im trying to do (going nuts, though) or aplying some kind of lock may could help to avoid those hangs, but in any case this method will be void as long a desfragmentation is performed, i guess.
The possible problem with Acronis as i see it is that it may hang the system while reading bad sectors the same way any other program do. Hence, i might be unable to perform a proper 1:1 clone and a waste of money on a new disk therefore.
In any case, that Black Scorpio seems a good choice - thanks! - my only concern though is if a 7200 HD will cause too much heat here, i see this one at 60ºC sometimes…(?)
- my only concern though is if a 7200 HD will cause too much heat here, i see this one at 60ºC sometimes…(?)