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partitioning around a bad sector

S

scottatwittenberg

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 10, 2002
Messages
3,306
so i installed windows on this used laptop today.. all was working well.. and then it got knocked onto the floor.. after that it ran like crap..

so i went to reformat the hard drive thinking it would find the bad sectors... and just mark them bad and format around them..

well.. twice in a row, it got to 46% and started clicking, like the arm is going all the way to the edge of the drive..

so, being a 20gb drive.. i made an 8gb partition, put windows on it.. and it works great..

now i am trynig to format the rest of teh drive in disk managment.. its doing the same thing once it hits 6%.. which is wha ti thought it would do..

so how can i just skip the next 10% of the drive.. and then format another 8 or so gb on the end?

do i need 3rd party software like partition magic? or can i do it in comp mgt somehow..

oh, and just curious.. what kind of damaged happened to the drive? i would that constitute a head crash? spinning drive gets dropped.. and heads rub across a section of the drive.. somethign like that?
 
Try using GParted (just like partition magic except free), boot from the cd and leave 10% of the free space unallocated, and then make your next partition behind it.

Don't know that it will work, but it's free and worth a shot.
 
The thing is though.... The bad spot was most likely caused by the drive heads making contact with the platter.

There is no telling what damage was done to the head itself. It may work for awhile and then quit entirely.
 
SpinRite from GRC can do wonders in such situations. Sure, you'll have a lot of opinions about it, but in the end it does what it's supposed to do: it can restore a hard drive to usable state as long as there is no physical damage to the platters. So the comment just made above about that possibility is always something to be aware of.

I've used SpinRite in all 6 incarnations of the program over the past decade or so. The only drive it could not restore to a usable state was one that did have a head crash and physical damage occurred so it was a dead drive, period.

Thousands of drives tested, a few hundred restored over the years, and only 1 completely dead for reasons that even SpinRite couldn't fix.

I can't give SpinRite a higher recommendation.
 
i forgot.. to check back on this..

i used windows diskmanager to make a 2gb partiion which i didn't format.. and then i made an 8gb partition after thatn which i did format.. it worked fine..

yes, i am pretty sure there is physical damage to the disk.. i might try spinrite though.. i will read up on it.
 
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