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General discussion

How to remove bad sectors marks from LS120?

Aug 27, 2004 4:22AM PDT

They were put there by scandisk a long time ago after the heads got jerked around, but now that I have them aligned better and its working well they are still there even though I've run scandisk again. Does scandisk scan sectors previously marked bad to confirm their condition when you do a surface scan? I'm wondering if it put them there just because it couldnt read the disk due to bad head alignment and I'd like to remove them and do a new scan to see if I can recover some space.

Discussion is locked

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Re: How to remove bad sectors marks from LS120?
Aug 27, 2004 4:28AM PDT

You didn't tell what version of OS and SCANDISK, but some did have an option to attempt recovery of bad sectors. BUT a simple format should have it start over.

And SPINRITE definitely does this.

Bob

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Re:98 se.
Aug 27, 2004 1:48PM PDT

Never saw "recovery" option. Did reformat. Didn't mention that was why I asked. The marks stayed.

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Re:98 se.
Aug 27, 2004 2:04PM PDT
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"Low Level"
Aug 28, 2004 2:35AM PDT

Scott:

many of the drive manufacturers provide software to low level format a drive. for instance Maxtor provides PowerMax 4.09 on their site that will test and set a drive back to it's factory specifications. The through lowlevel format takes a while as it has to check and write a byte to each sector of the drive. Western Digital has something similar on their site. once the drive is lowleveled, then you can fdisk it and format it to it's high level. Warning, only use the manufacturer's software as other software will overwrite the factory tracks that define the driv. Microscopes expensive software will do the same as Gibsons Spinrite, but try the manufacturer first.