Attacked by Bad Sectors
A week ago my computer took forever to boot and wouldn’t get into linux. After I tried verbose mode, it turned out there was a failure while reading a sector. I immediately suspected it was a Bad Sector.
Then I burned the HDD Regenerator tool that’s usually used to repair HDD bad sectors. At first it was fine until it got past 50%, and there were so many errors. HDD Regenerator also FAILED to repair it. I got discouraged for a moment, and I tried the following steps:
FSCK & CHKDSK
I used both of these tools, from Linux and Windows. Why use chkdsk? My data partition happened to still be NTFS.
Result: Failed!
DELETE PARTITION (BACKUP FIRST)
A standard step that’s usually done. Before deletion, I moved all the data first and rewrote the partition.
Result: Failed!
LOW LEVEL FORMATTING
This low level formatting is more than just a regular format. I really hoped it would work that time, but…
Result: Failed!
WRITE ZERO (QUICK & FULL)
Write Zero is a method used to fill all sectors with 0. There are 2 methods used. First, I used the quick one because I was already desperate at the time. The result was still a failure! Alright, I tried doing a Full operation with resignation.
Result : SUCCESS!
*Failed = there are still bad sectors.
I really didn’t expect it, but that method was able to deal with the bad sectors. At that point I had run out of options, what else could I do. In the end, all that was left was to rewrite the partition table and repartition.
Tools :
Hiren Boot Cd