How to fix bad sectors on Hard disk ?

[ronshor]

I have a few bad sectors on my second HDD.
It's not the Hard disk with the OP and I store only data on it (right now it's empty by the way).

Before I start saving files on it I would like to try to fix the bad sectors (all data is backed up of course...)

Does anyone know how can I fix the bad sectors ?
Or should I just live it like that since it seems like the system knows about it and won't save files on a bad area ...?

[geoaraujo]

As far as I know, bad sectors can't be fixed.

[ronw]

It might chug along fine for months, or even years, but by the time SMART says there is a problem, you really don't want to put anything valuable on that drive, and should it expect to it become to become a paperweight at any time.

[notabug]

KDE Partition Manager (Kickoff Launcher or your favorite/System) should do what you need. (Also compatible with ntfs formatted drives.) Right click to unmount (if already mounted) then right click again and left click Check. Click Apply on the menu bar.

[GreyGeek]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Mo....T._attributes

Count of reallocated sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks that sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area). This process is also known as remapping, and reallocated sectors are called "remaps". The raw value normally represents a count of the bad sectors that have been found and remapped. Thus, the higher the attribute value, the more sectors the drive has had to reallocate. This allows a drive with bad sectors to continue operation; however, a drive which has had any reallocations at all is significantly more likely to fail in the near future.^[3] While primarily used as a metric of the life expectancy of the drive, this number also affects performance. As the count of reallocated sectors increases, the read/write speed tends to become worse because the drive head is forced to seek to the reserved area whenever a remap is accessed. If sequential access speed is critical, the remapped sectors can be manually marked as bad blocks in the file system in order to prevent their use.

Hard drives control firmware used to include an application (usually console based) which allowed the user to do a wide variety of activities, especially a low level format and the ability to manually mark sectors as bad. I haven't encountered a bad sector on an HD is twenty years or more, so I am not familiar with any apps that could do what the onboard apps that came with the HD could do. BTW, most of these firmware apps were executed by calling a specific address on the firmware.

Here is a post which suggests a method: http://serverfault.com/questions/387...d-sector-count

[SteveRiley]

To clarify... notabug and GreyGeek are suggesting ways to ensure that your machine doesn't attempt to write to bad sectors by marking them as such. You can't actually repair these sectors to a usable state.