Platter Damage?

[Maxtr0sity]

I dropped my laptop while it was on (and torrenting). It restarted immediately and when I try to start the torrent again, it failed the cyclic redundancy check. Great. I run scandisk on the drive, it finds about 20 errors related to a handful pieces of software. It claims to fixed them and their respective applications function ok. Problem is, now I've been having major slowdowns whenever the hard drive is taxed, everything will lag tremendously and borderline freeze. The hard drive goes into a clicking pattern (but nothing out of the usual sounds), but so far, I've heard two distinctive un-normal clicks.

Question 1: is there a way to check hard drive for platter damage using software? SMART returns OK results.

Question 2: since I let checkdisk 'fix' the erroneous parts, what exactly is it fixing? Are those files now dummy files or original?

 

[xenotype]

1) Use SeaTools (find it on seagate's website, it should work on non-seagate drives, it worked on my fujitsu hd)

2) it might not be fixing anything, it could just be flagging the sectors/clusters as bad, so they wont be used.

sorry to hear about the laptop.

 

[Maxtr0sity]

Well, I started to run SpinRite last night, it's been running for almost 20 hours now with ETA of another 10 hours to go. It found a bunch of unrecoverable blocks and a couple of recoverable. My question is, once it finishes, will I be able to sector off the bad blocks of the drive and still use the remaining good bits? Will SpinRite do it? SeaTools?

 

[xenotype]

SpinRite should do it, SeaTools is more of a diagnostic tool, will let you know the drive is bad without actually doing anything about it.