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How can I put a corrupt drive into good use?

One of the hard drives in my desktop has some invisible bad sectors. Windows 10's "scan and repair" feature says that it has no errors. Glary utilities "check disk" also ran fine. But if I copy 20 files into it, I would be able to safely read back 19 and the disc will be stuck on 20th file forever. My understanding is that this is because the 20th file was somewhere in the bad invisible sector. Usually the OS recognizes such sectors and marks them as "bad" so it will no longer write any file on those sectors, but somehow this disc fools the tests. I was using this as my trash drive, I had placed my watched movies in it. But for 2 days I have been trying to move a particular movie from this disk to my external disk so that I can re-watch it. The transfer starts at 60MB/s, and after a few seconds gets completely stuck in mid air, and after an hour or so windows gives up and says file not readable.

I do not want to recover files. But, is there any good use for such a drive? Also, is there a way to find out if drive has bad sectors or if the controller corrupts the files while writing? I even formatted this drive recently as NTFS and unchecked "quick-format". This drive never witnessed power failure. I am at the verge of throwing it away, I just want to put it to use in case it can be re-used.

Following is S.M.A.R.T info SMART info of disk

PS: this drive came inside Lenovo Z-50-70 laptop bought in December 2014.

2 Answers2

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If your disk controller were bad, I'd expect all drives to have problems. Bad ram can corrupt files and cause CRC mismatches (bytes changed, etc) but that shouldn't cause read hangs like that.

If you ran badblocks (or had it run along with a format, usually -cc) it can do write & read testing of a few patterns (0, 1, 01, 10) to check for bad sectors (or "blocks"). It's available for any linux, maybe windows too but I'm not sure.

Then if it all tests good, it should be good to use (at least for a while, drives tend to fail over time). Or maybe the drive is really failing.

I'm not sure what your "scan and repair" and "disk check" were doing, but writing to & reading an entire terabyte drive would probably take at least an hour. If they just checked the filesystem basics it would be very quick, but not read/write the entire drive.

Xen2050
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spinrite from grcc.om by steve gibison is one of the few low level utilities that can actually deal with these kinds of problems. Sometimes it can fix them, but if the damage is that bad then chkdsk should mark it bad.

It can deal with weak sectors, and chkdsk can't.

cybernard
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