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Undoing marked bad sectors

K

Kongar

Gawd
Joined
Oct 25, 2004
Messages
779
Can we discuss the reverse of marking bad sectors with something like chkdsk? I've never actually been in this situation before - storage being cheap and all, I just pitch drives with bad sectors before they become an issue.

However, I recently had a dimm module completely die, blue screen and everything. Strangely, the symptoms led me to believe I was looking at a failed hard drive (SSD), since I only got errors when I tried to utilize the ssd. (I could for example boot from a Linux live cd just fine). Anyway, further troubleshooting identified the bad dimm module and everything is just fine again.

But in the process, I did a chkdsk from win 7 installation disk and it incorrectly (I think) flagged a whole bunch of bad sectors because things were fubared due to the bad dimm.

How do you "undo" bad sector flagging? Low level format? What about say reformatting ntfs to ext4, and then reformatting back to ntfs?

I'm pretty sure the drive is fine, but I've never been in this situation before, and now I'm more curious than anything else.

Thanks
 
This may not be the most efficient way to proceed, but what I do is this.
First, you need to run an actual OS-independent HDD tool like MHDD or whatever your drive's vendor offers. The "long test" is what you'd want - scanning the media surface.
In the case of WD drives I've encountered, the diagnostic tool usually does a good job at determining whether it's a soft (ex. incomplete/corrupted write) or hard error (media failure).
Personally I use MHDD because it's vendor, OS and filesystem agnostic.
Sometimes, the scan itself triggers the disk's internal mechanisms to check a particular area out and apply the fixes, so that after a full shutdown and startup even the SMART data becomes updated.
Now, if it's a 'soft' error, then backing up your existing partitions, zero-ing the drive and restoring the backup often fixed the situation in the cases I've encountered.
I normally perform the zero-ing part by either MHDD's erase feature, or via the 'dd' command within Linux.
In all cases, it's important to look at your SMART values, especially those relating to: Uncorrectable Offline, Current Pending, Reallocated count, Reallocation events, UDMA CRC.
 
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