Hdutil - Sector test

[Mark]

Hello,
I've Hddriver version 7 and checked recently a Falcon060 (CT060) with an internal IDE drive.
I used the option 'sector test' and found that the existing hard-disk has some bad sectors.

Does the program provide a method to map out those bad sectors?

Kind regards,

Mark

[uweseimet]

At the end of the test HDDRUTIL offers to write an AHDI compatible bad sector list, which can be used when formatting SCSI drives to tell the drive which sectors not to use. At least I think HDDRUTIL 7, which is rather ancient, did this. (Double-check with the HDDRIVER manual.) For IDE drives this will not work, and if your IDE drive is very old it may even be damaged when formatting it.
All in all you may be better off with a different drive, or if your drive is not very old you can format it and the drive should replace the bad sectors automatically with spare sectors. (I'm not sure anymore if HDDRUTIL 7 offers to format IDE drives, though, but later versions do.) If the drive does not remap the bad sectors I would not use this drive anymore, as things might get worse.

[Mark]

Hello,
Thanks for the quick reply. I can confirm that HDDRUTIL 7 formats IDE drives.
I hoped that I still could use the hard-disk with the data, without reformatting and remapped bad sectors.

[uweseimet]

If the affected sectors are located in the FAT or other administrative areas they may render whole partitions unusable. If they are located in the data sectors only some files may be affected and tools like DISKUS (German only) can fix this for each partition and mark the sectors as bad in the repective FAT.
But I wouldn't risk losing more data due to a broken drive. You might consider replacing this drive, maybe by a memory card.