Codenstuff.com

*bump*

I need to have a solution before 29 of this month. Otherwise I'm stuck with having to format with the Windows 8 DVD every time it stops working.

If you speak to any IT professional they will say there is no way to fix a failing hard disk from the user's point of view.
If you need it to be reliable you would need to swap the drive.

I don't have any important data on the drive (obviously). I want it NOT to "not work" when I turn it on. I would guess the problem is occurring because the files required to boot from hard disk are stored on the bad sectors and sometimes they're accessible, other times they're not. But even if that's the case, could they have moved from one place on the hard disk to other? I'm asking because it does not show any boot errors when newly formatted but only occurs after a couple of days of usage.

Only if I could somehow identify on what part of the hard drive most of the bad sectors are, so I could partition about 50-100 GB of it. And mark it not-for-use. I wonder how we could do that.

You're right, any IT pro would tell me it's irreparable since it's failing but I don't need all the reliability sh*t for about two months, do I? I'm good with the data getting corrupt and files not working, but I can't bear the trouble of restarting it for 20 minutes thinking desperately when it would turn on.

By formatting the drive you are actually clearing any list of bad sectors (the $BadClus file) that chkdsk maintains. It doesn't help the stability of the system if the OS keeps trying to use these areas again.
It would make sense to run a full disk check (chkdsk /r) to try and map out all the bad sectors, and see if that helps.

It is still possible that the bad sector count will increase over time, so more disk checks may be needed. I don't think much else can be done in this case.

I'll run the chkdsk /r now. Does it matter if the disk is in use, like maybe a download in progress?

I figured it won't work. It says the volume is in use by another process and scheduled it until the next restart. But what if the computer doesn't turn on on the next restart?

Can someone confirm what the limitations of the free version of PBD are? Or is there an alternative?

http://www.goodlucksoft.com/

I got my hard disk replaced and now I'm using the previous one as my secondary. And it would be better if it worked without flaws. The software PBD offers a possible solution for bad sectors: partitioning the bad area away. I won't mind if 100 GB is separated from the 640 GB HDD as long as it works flawlessly.

I used the damaged HDD for over a month by using the chkdsk /r command on restart and it kinda worked as long as I didn't restart the computer much. It would hang on restart, lol. For about 20 days, the HDD worked fine without a restart

It doesn't say if it has limitations. I don't know of any good free repair tools off hand but a search turned up this: http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-par ... nager.html I have no idea if it works though :?

I'll try it out.

EDIT: It doesn't repair the drive. It's just an advanced partition tool.

personally i found that using a ghost unit where i put the failing disk and a blank drive in to do a direct clone was the easiest way without loosing data as u wont be using the main disk's indexing, as you wont be in any os

i have used this features many times when repairing clients pc's