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    160gb HDD with a ton of bad sectors?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by whitrzac, Dec 18, 2011.

  1. whitrzac

    whitrzac The orange end is cold...

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    my brain is fried right now soo just bear with me...

    • segate 160gb 7200rpm 2.5in
    • thought it would be a good idea to defrag while I was driving home:eek:
    • I managed to find every pothole on the road:mad:
    • HDD has more than a few bad sectors...:(

    Is there anyway I can format it to a smaller drive to bypass the bad sectors? any data I put on it wouldn't be important, it would be for temp movie storage/etc...
     
  2. miro_gt

    miro_gt Notebook Deity

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    sleep over it.

    then tomorrow go and order yourself a nice 500Gb WD scorpio black and call it a day.
     
  3. Syberia

    Syberia Notebook Deity

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    This is why I've started advocating SSDs in laptops. They can take all the bumps and jolts you'll give them and keep on going.

    I'm sure that 160gb drive you had wasn't anywhere near full, so if you can live with the loss of 32gb, I'd go on eBay tomorrow and pick up a cheap 128gb SSD and call it even. You'll love the speed increase, too.

    I smacked my laptop on a table a few weeks ago while it was on and the HDD called it quits, too. I'm loving the replacement drive so far.

    EDIT: Whatever you decide to do, back up everything NOW. Once the bad sectors start, you are running on borrowed time.
     
  4. pengy_666

    pengy_666 Notebook Evangelist

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    defrag, while Driving?
     
  5. 3Fees

    3Fees Notebook Deity

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    I' d try windows 7 error checking -scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors,,Spinrite from Gibson Ranch can recover an HDD and others,,One I read about its close to a week to get the job done with a scratched disk its iffy, if the stylus merely erased parts of sectors by jumping around-recovery should be possible--by selective undelete ect in a recovery program.

    How to fix bad sectors or clusters on hard drive ? - Hardware Peripherals

    +N!

    Cheers
    3Fees :)
     
  6. Syberia

    Syberia Notebook Deity

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    It'll also cost close to $1000, and is not worth it unless the data is one-of-a-kind-cannot-be-reproduced-critical-to-a-multi-million-dollar-business-deal.
     
  7. whitrzac

    whitrzac The orange end is cold...

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    there wasn't anything on it... it was a fresh instal...

    I know the drive is 'dieing' but I was hoping I could use it for movies/music/etc so I don't have any more flash drives 'borrowed'...
     
  8. roxshot

    roxshot Notebook Guru

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    If you haven't already, run chkdsk -f which will try to fix any bad data. After that you could try using GParted. It's a simple boot CD with a pretty powerful partitioner tool.
     
  9. afhstingray

    afhstingray Notebook Prophet

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    it'll be fine for non essential stuff you dont mind losing if a corrupt happens. do buy and register your new hard drive before 31st december though, as after 31st all the hard drive manufacturers are dropping their warranties from 5 years to 1 or 2 years. :mad: :mad: :mad: