is it possible to undo bad sector remapping?

[duby229]

Hey,

I have a drive that has a handful of bad sectors that I'm repairing for a customer of mine. I'm going to sell him a new drive regardless, so this isn't really that important. But, he already ran seatools on the drive and it remapped those bad sectors. I would like to be able to un-remap those sectors so that I can run hdd regenerator on them.

Is that possible?

 

[devman]

Once the drives firmware has remapped the sector that can't be undone. Seatools doesn't remap sectors itself, the drives firmware does that automatically when it detects failed writes (it reallocates the write to a replacement sector and continues).

 

[duby229]

well, that kinda sucks. But oh well.

There is a linux tool call badblocks as well as a another dos tool called hdd regenerator that can usually correct bad sectors that aren't physically damaged.

 

[devman]

Modern drive firmwares only remap sectors that can't be successfully written to after several retries. I don't know what hdd regenerator does, but badblocks will cause sector remaps for bad sectors if you run it in read-write (aka destructive) test mode.

I always use badblocks to test new drives before they go in to service. After a run the SMART data can be read to see if any sectors were remapped (or anything else tripped).