Damaged HD

S

svenrg

Registered
Hi... I bought a FW 120GB HD a while ago. One night I accidentally dropped it on the floor, and certain areas on the HD seems to be working no more. Sometimes when I would access certain files on the FW HD the finder (OS X) would lock up, and I would have to force quit the finder. I have since partitioned the HD into two 60GB parts. The one partition is working great, while the damaged parts seems to be confined to the other partition. Now, I would love to somehow map out the damaged sectors on my one partition. How can I do this? I have run Drive 10 a million times, but I still have the same problems with the bad partition all the same.

Any ideas?
 
more than likely one of two things has happened. Either the read/write heads smacked a hard disk platter and placed pits into the surface or you have misaligned or broken one of the read/write heads.

Unfortunately a problem such as this is irreparable, also I know of no way to mark specific sectors as bad.

I would also not jump to conclusions about your problem being on the second partition. remember, this issue was happening when you were accessing a specific physical location on the disk. Currently there may not be a file within the current location that is bad.

The only way to test this would be to fill the partitions with data and try to access these locations.

Also, many file systems will mark sectors of a HD bad durring the format process. These sectors may already be mapped out for you.

You could also just go out and buy any standard IDE HD to replace the drive within the firewire enclosure if it becomes too much of a hassle.
 
Hi, thanks for your reply. The "good" partition is totally filled up, so I'm pretty sure it does not have any problems.

I guess, if I was able to tell exactly where the errors where, I could make a partition holding my bad sectors, and have others partitions with only good sectors...?
 
Correct, if you were able to locate them you could definately do this. As I said, durring a format many file systems will actualy mark bad sectors automaticaly. I know PC's will. I"m sure Mac's should do the same. Try filling up your second 60 gig partition and see what happens
 
I have the AppleCare CD (meaning TechTool Deluxe) and it has the option to map out bad sectors. You could try that.
 
I performed a surface scan (read/write) on the bad partition overnight with TechTool Pro 3.0.6. It came back after 12 hours telling me that the drive is OK. I'm now back in OS X and Drive 10 still reports errors though it cant fix them. I think I'll try to fill up the bad partition with big files and then leave the ones that make the finder crash when accessed.

Are there any other apps to format a HD besides Apple's software?
 
OK, I filled up the bad partition with 700MB files. I always copied the the last copy to make sure it could be read. Whenever the copy could not be read, I started over on a new folder.

This is how it turned out:
1 : 6.79 GB
2 : 6.79 GB
3 : 23.7 GB
4 : 696.2 MB
5 : 692.6 MB
6 : 1.73 GB
7 : 696.2 MB
8 : 700.2 MB
9 : 696.2 MB
10 : 1 GB
11 : 696.2 MB
12 : 1.35 GB
13 : 2.2 GB
14 : 8.19 GB

Now, if I turned all of these folders into partitions it would indeed be messy.

Now I'm thinking: Hide the files that can not be read and the rest of the disk would be fine? I'm guessing the bad files would occupy the bad sectors and stay there...

What do you think?
 
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