Is there a way to disable and/or not use bad parts of an HDD?

[lafrente]

So I got this hdd which is in a pretty bad shape. I want to keep unimportant stuff on it, of which I've a back up elsewhere. But even after doing chkdsk /r, the drive is bad. Some files will open in an instant, others will take minutes because its on a bad part of the drive. The bad part isn't necessarily a bad sector or a cluster, it's just very slow access for some reason. But when a file is on "good" parts of the disk, it works just like a new HDD.

 

Drive is 500gb, I am fine even with disabling 50% of it to get a reliable performance. I don't care if the other half will also fail soon or not. Is there a way to do this?

[Radium_Angel]

9 minutes ago, lafrente said:

pretty bad shape

 

9 minutes ago, lafrente said:

reliable performance

 

9 minutes ago, lafrente said:

fail soon

Does not compute.

Seriously, it's a 500GB drive. Chuck it and get something else. The amount of time you will spend isolating bad sectors will be wasted, as more and more sectors go bad. It's a losing race.

 

But if you really want to undertake this

You might look into

https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

or

https://www.diskgenius.com/ (warning, the UI is cluttered)

[Kilrah]

http://www.dposoft.net/rbd.html

 

 

[aisle9]

24 minutes ago, lafrente said:

So I got this hdd which is in a pretty bad shape. I want to keep unimportant stuff on it, of which I've a back up elsewhere. But even after doing chkdsk /r, the drive is bad. Some files will open in an instant, others will take minutes because its on a bad part of the drive. The bad part isn't necessarily a bad sector or a cluster, it's just very slow access for some reason. But when a file is on "good" parts of the disk, it works just like a new HDD.

 

Drive is 500gb, I am fine even with disabling 50% of it to get a reliable performance. I don't care if the other half will also fail soon or not. Is there a way to do this?

Get a $25 480GB SSD, transfer everything to it, DBAN the hell out of the HDD and chuck it. It's done for, and continuing to use it is begging for a catastrophic failure.

[lafrente]

32 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

http://www.dposoft.net/rbd.html

 

 

Thanks, that looks like exactly what I need.

5 minutes ago, WikiForce said:

run chkdsk full 5 stages scan, that should do it, it marks bad sectors to never be used again or full format of drive which can even repair them in some cases

I would try, but I inserted it on a very old laptop and left it for chkdsk, it took about 20 hours till it completed the /r scan and didn't fix anything, so I dont want to get into that right now. And I really doubt if anything is fixable on this drive anymore. I am just trying to use the good part, see how it reacts, what happens to the data, if it goes even worse etc. 

 

--------------

 

And to the rest of the answers: Holy shit. I thought I said everything I had to say. I have 5tb of storage laying around in my house. And I know how to check prices of storage devices. I am just doing an experiment and asking a question if its possible or not. Jesus.

[Archer42]

5 hours ago, lafrente said:

And to the rest of the answers: Holy shit. I thought I said everything I had to say. I have 5tb of storage laying around in my house. And I know how to check prices of storage devices. I am just doing an experiment and asking a question if its possible or not.

This question is almost as old as computers are.

Short answer to this question is - "Yes, it is possible. No, it is not worth the time spent and will not work reliably".

 

Modern hdd-s are pretty smart, they reallocate bad sectors to spare area automatically. So during normal drive life/wear if bad sectors appear they will not be visible on host PC level and will be dealt with by the hdd internally. Once amount of bad sectors exceeds hdd-s capabilities to deal with the issue and bad sectors start being visible for host pc the drive is way too far gone to be worth spending time on. There are probably physical issues with either surface or r/w heads, and even if you mark all the bad sectors new ones are likely to be appearing constantly, causing slowdowns and data corruption.

 

If you want to try it - there are multiple ways. One of them you tried already, and it did not work. As expected. One more option would be performing full scan with victoria or something similar, getting list of all the bad and/or slow blocks and creating partition well clear of those. Results will, most like, be the same.