Refurbish partially failed hard drive?
A friend gave me an external hard drive that had been performing terribly to see what I can diagnose and fix.
First step was shucking the drive to eliminate the USB controller as a variable. Then I chucked it into an old PC and ran chkdsk. It took 2 full days (>40 hrs runtime), but it eventually completed with ~8000 bad sectors. The event viewer additionally reports controller issues - The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort4.
I did run the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool (it only detected the drive when the enclosure controller was attached, but eh). It reported an error and stopped, and there is no documentation on the internet that says what the error code means.
Copying is nearly impossible as the transfer starts and the device starts thrashing immediately, rw heads clicking, while transfer is stalled. I do however suspect that the problem is only limited to a certain area of the hard drive.
So I wonder - is there some application out there that will map the problem areas and then create a partition around them or fill that area with hidden files or some tool to mark all slow areas as bad blocks or any other method to recover some functionality?
Solution 1:
So I wonder - is there some application out there that will map the problem areas and then create a partition around them or fill that area with hidden files or some tool to mark all slow areas as bad blocks or any other method to recover some functionality?
ddrescue will provide you with that information about unreadable areas with its log file. Creating a partition around defective areas is not a smart concept but it shows up irregularly on this site. Why splitting the space of hard drive in potentially small unsuable areas when FAT and NTFS file systems can store information about bad sectors? Invoking chkdsk with the right parameters does the job.
Unless the defective drive is the last one available and assuming you work on the European Space Station and the pizza shuttle has already left for the day there is no need to waste time on broken drives.