I had a few laptops that were taking a long time to start Windows. I scanned them with HDD Regenerator and they showed as having delays at the beginning of the drive. I tried repairing them with the program but they still showed the delays. They were still slow after doing a format and a clean install of Windows 7. They were 120-160 GB drives so I just replaced them with new larger drives. I installed Windows and they started up with no problems. I then had someone ask me if I had any 2.5 drives that he could use to upgrade his PS3 12gb hard drive with. I again tested the drives in a laptop and they still showed the delays. I then found out that PS3 drives need to be formatted as FAT32. I attached them externally to my desktop and formatted the entire drives as FAT32. I again put them in a laptop and ran a scan with HDD Regenerator and the delays were no longer there. I reformatted them as NTFS and put them in the laptop and scanned them again. The delays no longer show. I installed Windows 7 and they now start up normally. Could the reformatting to FAT32 and then to NTFS again have repaired them?
Generally "unstable" bad sectors can be repaired by overwriting them. You may have successfully repaired them but they might still be unstable and go bad again. I have had success repairing drives with these types of errors, but I never fully trust them as I've had drives go bad again afterwards. What I do to recover them is I write zeros to the entire drive and then run a program like Spinrite or HDD Regenerator. To test if it was successful I use SMART tests and badblocks (like in Parted Magic: badblocks -swe 1 /dev/sda) and let it run a full cycle of all it's tests. I mark the drives as recovered and never use them for production or anything I don't want to lose. They're fine for scratch drives.
The drives I am working on did not show bad sectors in HDD Regenerator only the delays at the start of the drive. But after reading your reply, I remembered that I used Active Killdisk on them after removing them from the original laptops. I did not check them after using Killdisk to see if they still had the delays. Killdisk would have written the zeros on them.
They can be used as external drives to save files with small sizes. Saving larger files to them might end up giving errors or unable to retrieve the whole files from them.
yup.... I agree. I've used a program called Test Disk before to locate the area on the drive with the bad sectors, and partition off the area so it will not be used for file storage, but eventually bad sectors only get worse as time goes by and the life of that drive is always questionable
Thanks everyone for the information. I will keep an eye on one of the drives I use. I am very conscious on doing backups so if it goes I would not lose much.
or bad partition table or infected mbr rootkit.. seen those before. i always clean disk completely with a bootable tool like gparted or dban.
We had something like that sometime 2009 with a WD 500gb SATA 2 drive. We also used HDD Regenerator. It repaired it when we used HDD Regen but we seem to notice that that drive often gives errors. It was when we were doing an image backup that both Acronis Western Digital edition and Macrium Reflect free WinPE disc alerted that it could not continue because of an error. chkdsk /r or chkdsk /f did it sometimes but noticed again that we saved a big sized image it would go with the error again. After 5 -6 months the drive died on us. If you still want to use it you can but I'd go the way of Hadron-Curious because although you can use it saving large files on it will eventually lead to errors. Best is to buy a new one and save important files on it. Not the one with the bad sectors. That's already a sign that it will eventually die. Incidentally what brand of hard disk are you using...? Hitachi hdd's (which bacblaze sees as good are now owned by WD. You may want to check out the blackblaze hard drive reliability Q3 report 2015 and the PCWorld article about Seagate being slapped with a class action suit due to poor hard drive rates. I can't post the link here as I am still below the 20 per quota. You may wanna google it. goodluck.
Did the HDD regen really ever repaired something? i've used it once to test and after days of running it reported it repaired the hdd, but nothing was repaired, it only reported it. Last couple of years i've seen it being recommended and used by a lot of people and they all were fooled, after waiting for days the hdd still was corrupted though the regen app reported it to be repaired..
Seems to be that you and those others, who complained about that lengthy process, were using the function for to repair ALL sectors, which would take a really long time, up to even 2 weeks! And the whole time, the HDD has to run fully! Under such condition, the HDD gets very hot and will maybe fail again! Some years ago, we tried for to repair an SCSI III 15000rpm HDD and had such problem! As the data of our customer was very important to get back, we had finally placed that HDD with extended cables in a Refrigerator with the computer on it's side and was let run the apps that way! That worked on the first try! If the HDD has a real physical failure, also HDD Regenerator couldn't do anything! HDD Regenerator works with gaussing and degaussing methods and for that, it also needs 100% good Reading Heads in the drive. Still 60-80% of most error's are Soft-Error's which could be solved many times by apps like HDD Regenerator, DRevitalize, and others. Just, even if an HDD works well again after done such work with it, caution is on order all times and that drive shouldn't be used for important works anymore!