Programs for scanning drives for bad/irreparable blocks

[rat]

Not wanting to take my system offline while I do Spinrite on some drives, just wanted to know if there's online alternatives that come recommended. I have a pile of 5 drives here, all of which came out of Raid systems that failed. My hunch is that the raid boxes/controllers themselves failed and not the drives that I still have. Drives that couldn't be detected in an enclosure were already thrown out.

Since I did encounter some read issues on some of these drives, I want to confirm it wasn't due to bad sectors on the drives themselves. If the drive does have bad sectors, not an issue... just would like to be able to permanently mark them out and partition them off.

Not generally worried about reliability/general failure since all 5 of these drives will go into a JBOD box and will be used only for temporary storage (media encoding) so I might as well keep using them until they completely die.

 

[DrLobotomy]

I use the utility from manufacturer or just use scandisk in Windows.

Unless I am misunderstanding something.

 

[rat]

I use the utility from manufacturer or just use scandisk in Windows.

Unless I am misunderstanding something.

I'm looking for a way to destructively test for and mark bad blocks on a drive while it is online in Windows. (Can't leave my system down long enough to run things like SpinRite) Also, I'm not attempting to do data recovery, just to punish the disk so that unknown bad blocks won't be an issue for when I use the drive as temporary storage.

 

[mwroobel]

Well, DBAN would be my suggestion but if you need to do this from windows then KillDisk is probably your best bet. There is a freeware version.

 

[rat]

Well, DBAN would be my suggestion but if you need to do this from windows then KillDisk is probably your best bet. There is a freeware version.

I'm not trying to Erase, though. I'm trying to destructively test a drive to reveal additional bad blocks that can be marked out of use.

 

[mwroobel]

I'm not trying to Erase, though. I'm trying to destructively test a drive to reveal additional bad blocks that can be marked out of use.

Killdisk (or any other similar program) will destructively write to every single available sector of the drive. As it does this, the drive firmware will mark sector errors as you go and remap them to the spare area. Run each drive through a pass or two (and if you want to put more stress on the drive, use the random instead of sequential mode), make note of the number of reallocated sectors (any SMART app will show you this) and move to the next one. Then start over and do the same thing, and see if the number of reallocated sectors has increased. If it has, (since someone has already marked the drive as bad) just toss it and move on to the next one.

 

[rat]

Killdisk (or any other similar program) will destructively write to every single available sector of the drive. As it does this, the drive firmware will mark sector errors as you go and remap them to the spare area. Run each drive through a pass or two, make note of the number of reallocated sectors (any SMART app will show you this) and move to the next one. Then start over and do the same thing, and see if the number of reallocated sectors has increased. If it has, (since someone has already marked the drive as bad) just toss it and move on to the next one.

HUH... That should do exactly the trick then. The biggest issue that I always had was that erasing a partition would also erase the marked bad blocks within that partition. So I was indeed looking for something on a more firmware level.