G'day,

I've just been gifted 2 x 80GB ATA hard drives from my father-in-law, who has upgraded his PC.

One is fine, but he says the other had a few bad sectors, and so he'd formatted it into 2 partitions "around" the bad sectors.

Now, I know going WAY back, Symantec's disk program used to just mark out any bad sectors, and not use them... but - what does OS X/Disk Utility do?

I've already reformatted the good one to Mac OS Extended (Journalled)... haven't gotten around to the "bad" one yet... but just wondering, is there something "extra" I need to do, or will the bad sectors be detected automatically and dealt with?


cheers

cosmic

As far as I know, if more than 10 bad sectors are on the HD's media, it's fecked.
I use Tech Tool Pro to scan for bad sectors - and perhaps Tech Tool will too, yet a new 80Gig HD (3.5" PATA) can be purchased for around $80 to $100.

No way of knowing unless one tests it first.

Cosmic,
you can use TechTools to do a surface scan and lock out any bad sectors.
Or
Reformat the disk with Disk Utility, and select the Security options and Zero out data.
This takes ages, but in the process of writing to every sector also identifies and locks out bad ones.

Thanks for that guys.

I'll try the zero option first.

Probably going to use one of them to hold all my music for the TAM, and the other (good drive) as a backup drive.

Chuck it - the "bad" disk will only get worse and cause you sadness Many years ago I used to map out bad blocks on hard disks too, but without fail not all bad blocks were found, and more kept cropping up.

JB

When I formatted it as suggested, zeroing all data, it didn't mention finding any bad sectors...

It's the drive I've been trying to hook up to my AWA DVD player - so it's now also been partioned in different ways several times over the past few hours...

I'm only going to use it for storing songs to play through the TAM, and - well, was also going to use it for watching videos, but it seems not...

Wont be too heartbroken if it dies, therefore. Wont be losing data I don't have elsewhere. (Only have 2GB of mp3's in my iTunes folder... I'll look at moving select CDs over to it as well, but obviously then I'll have them as "backup" on the original CDs..)

Cosmic,
Only TechTools and the like tell you how many bad sectors it finds in a surface scan.
(This can be a real pain, you do a Surface scan that takes ages, it tells you there are a few bad sectors, so you then set it to run again taking ages to map them out.)

Apparently, Disk Utility just maps them out when you do a format writing zeroes, and never know how many there were.

As Byrd says, it's just a pain in the be-hind.

You can Zero Out Data with Disk Utility, and then run TechTool's Surface Scan to find there are no bad blocks (no bad sectors) on the HD at all... and then install a whole OS, configure it, install Software etc - spend hours setting it up - and then three weeks down the track: ehhhhhh!

Failure to boot.

cw

Its not worth the risk of losing more data in my opinion, there are enough of them floating about quite cheaply.

I'll just chip in as well and say that once a drive starts to develop bad sectors, it's gotten to the stage where it is relying on a walking-frame to boot up. Not worth the bother.

See what a SMART utility says.

When I was using Disk Utility it advised the SMART statis was n/a... Do I need it formatted fully in Mac Extended for it to work?

Sometimes HDs - or older HDs don't support S.M.A.R.T. which makes things even more confusing, unless you can track down the specs on the make and model of the HD in question.

If it can't read SMART satus then the drives are truly ancient, and not worth trusting.

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7
Ultra ATA
80 Gbytes
Model ST380011A
Firmware 8.01

DriveGenius will also tell you if there are bad sectors...