Best software to repair bad cluster on Hard Drive?

[Delta808]

My drive is going bad, crkdsk is finding alot of errors on my drive. I have a program called spinrite will that restore and remove the errors? What program can I use to fix this or are all of them a waste of money?

Basically can a bad sector hard drive be fixed?

 

[AddRAM]

No it can`t, it`s a damaged part of the surface. I have a couple 1 TB drives with 1 bad sector on each.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sector

http://www.auslogics.com/en/articles/bad-sector/

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Check-your-hard-disk-for-errors

run sfc /scannow

instructions are below

 

[Britton30]

If you already own Spinrite, try it out, it won't damage the drive. What it does is when a bad sector is found it tries to read the data in it several different ways and relocates it to a good sector. It hen marks the bad as unwritable. It won't work however if there is a mechanical defect in the drive.

 

[ICIT2LOL]

Mate if you want to test the actual surface try Partition Wizard it has specific test for that

Best Free Partition Manager Freeware and free partition magic for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Vista and Windows XP 32 bit & 64 bit. MiniTool Free Partition Manager Software Home Edition.

 

[Delta808]

Thanks, I ran spinrite level 2 and it seemed to respond better than before but it still freezes when I try to defrag the disk. I'm gonna run level 4 then try one last program.. if that doesn't work I'm just gonna get a new drive.

I'm wondering if I clone the drive, then format the bad drive will the sectors go away?

 

[Britton30]

The bad cluster(s) will remain, but a format may not include it. It will likely show up yet in the SMART tests.

 

[Mark Phelps]

Despite what they claim, Spinrite does not REPAIR bad clusters. That is a hardware problem and software can't fix it. What Spinrite does is attempt to read the bad clusters in various ways and then move the data to an unused good cluster. I used to use it all the time years ago -- when drives cost a fortune -- but when I tried this again a couple of years ago, it failed. So, I don't think it works anymore -- but that is just my experience.

 

[Delta808]

The bad cluster(s) will remain, but a format may not include it. It will likely show up yet in the SMART tests.

Okay, well it sounds like it's no such thing as a software fix, the only hardware fix is a need hard drive.

Despite what they claim, Spinrite does not REPAIR bad clusters. That is a hardware problem and software can't fix it. What Spinrite does is attempt to read the bad clusters in various ways and then move the data to an unused good cluster. I used to use it all the time years ago -- when drives cost a fortune -- but when I tried this again a couple of years ago, it failed. So, I don't think it works anymore -- but that is just my experience.

As of right now, it only freezes when I try to do a defrag or use any program to try to test the hard drive. Other than that it works good enough to use daily.