Hard drive utility to aggressively mark bad sectors

[John Hupp]

The hard drive utilities I know about are geared toward keeping sectors in
use rather than marking them bad. But I have a drive right now with problem
sectors that are weak (MOST of the time still functional), and I would just
rather have them marked as bad so the drive performs well.

So I want a utility to run the usual kinds of tests but mark sectors as bad
at the first sign of trouble rather than allowing multiple read/write
attempts or lengthy timeout parameters.

Anyone know how to do that?

--John Hupp

 

[JS]

Disk Diagnostic Utilities from:

Western Digital's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics
http://support.wdc.com/download/?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=3

Seagate's SeaTools
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools

Maxtor's (Now Seagate) PowerMax
http://www.seagate.com/maxtor/

Fujitsu's Utilities
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/support/utilities.html

Samsung's Disk manager software
http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/shdiag.htm

Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test software
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

JS

"John Hupp" <msnews@prpcompany.com> wrote in message
news:OnNfXN42HHA.5740@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> The hard drive utilities I know about are geared toward keeping sectors in
> use rather than marking them bad. But I have a drive right now with
> problem sectors that are weak (MOST of the time still functional), and I
> would just rather have them marked as bad so the drive performs well.
>
> So I want a utility to run the usual kinds of tests but mark sectors as
> bad at the first sign of trouble rather than allowing multiple read/write
> attempts or lengthy timeout parameters.
>
> Anyone know how to do that?
>
> --John Hupp
>

 

[Ghostrider]

JS wrote:

> Disk Diagnostic Utilities from:
>
> Western Digital's Data LifeGuard Diagnostics
> http://support.wdc.com/download/?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=3
>
> Seagate's SeaTools
> http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
>
> Maxtor's (Now Seagate) PowerMax
> http://www.seagate.com/maxtor/
>
> Fujitsu's Utilities
> http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/support/utilities.html
>
> Samsung's Disk manager software
> http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/shdiag.htm
>
> Hitachi's Drive Fitness Test software
> http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT
>
> JS
>

And don't forget Steve Gibson's Spinrite:

http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm