HDAT2 forum

I am looking for the fastest way to mark off sections of bad sectors from a disk. What happened is that I was helping a client investigate the slowness of their HD. Initially it looked like a full HD and there was an unused 30G partition. So I deleted the 30G partition and used Dell's extpart to extend the primary parition into this 30G. Everything looked fine except that Disk Manager was reporting the partition still the old size even though My Computer showed the full size. When I rebooted, the volume would not mount. Further investigating revealed bad spots on the Hard Disk. Apparently some of these spots ended up on the parition table and is keeping Windows from mounting the Volume even when connected to a working system. I can see the files with some third party programs, but it is hit and pick and after each copy, there is a serious time delay, like 30 seconds, before I can copy another file. I tried cloning with both Ghost and Acronis, but they get to about 92% where they hang on bad sectors forever. The math is yielding about a 4 month wait for it to finish. Of course this is unacceptable. I don't understand why these programs won't adjust the partition on the clone until the end of the process. Even if dumping to an image, I can't get the data out of the files even though I know it is there. Very Frustrating. Acronis will delete the file when aborted and Ghost leaves the image files, but you can read them with Ghost Explorer because it wants the last image file. I have read to run it with -corrupt and -noindex options, but they do not change the behavior. I tried spinrite, but it too hangs way too long on the bad sectors.

I am not familiar with HDat2, but I started a repair and at least I can see it progressing but it too is slow. What is the fastest way to mark off these bad sectors so I can get the rest of the data off the drive? I see several options and I am not familiar with what actually does the repairs the fastest. I am not worried about most of the drive, I just want the 90% that I know is there and recoverable. It seems there should be a program that looks for bad sectors, but when it finds them, instead of the slow trying to recover and get the data, it should skip ahead rather quickly to find the next good spot and then mark off all the sectors in between so my cloning software will work past them. What is the best way to handle these kind of drives?

Fortunately, this drive seems fairly stable and I don't see a ramping of new bad spots like I see with alot of drives. The drive ran for 5 weeks before I finally aborted the clone. I had a similar drive last month and I got 46G of data in a Ghost image file before the drive completely crapped out. However, it did no good. I have all this data in the image files and can't get to any of it. Very Frustrating for me and my Clients. Is there any way to manually put a partition on the drive and see the data that it already cloned over? Ideas anyone?

If I am not wrong the only way to check bad sectors is to check all sectors (or you can select the LBA area only),
so if you have 40 GB disk it will be faster than for 1 TB disk.

What I eventually found to work was some software by prosoft engineering.

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/

Actually the software I used came off Hiren's Boot CD and did a similar clone to Ghost or Acronis, but unlike their products, this one actually left what it copied on the drive when I was forced to abort the process at 92%. The system was actually bootable and only had some minor issues left to resolve. They should advertise their superior copy process more. It really saved me and my client on this job. I hope this information helps someone else.