laptop hdd repair

[joecass]

Anyone know of a good tool to repair bad sectors on a Western Digital SATA laptop drive ? I've used SeaTools, and various other programs with success on Seagate, Maxtor & IBM hard drives..... but WD Data Lifeguard just reports bad sectors,
as far as I know doesn't have repair options. Any advice would be appreciated. BTW, I have all WD DLG floppies and
CD's going back to Windows 98..... is there a version that does repair ?

[aedipuss]

there is no repair for bad sectors. use windows drive error checking and it should write the sectors off into the unusable file.

[MJA]

you can't fix a physical damage with a software .back up before u have a total lost and start shopping for a new drive

[jagabo]

you can't fix a physical damage with a software .back up before u have a total lost and start shopping for a new drive

I agree with this. In my experience, when a drive starts developing bad blocks, it may shortly develop more. When a drive starts having problems I copy it to a new drive right away. I then often use the old drive as a secondary drive for unimportant files. Sometimes the drive keeps working for years. Sometimes it quickly develops more bad blocks so I toss it.

[redwudz]

If I recall correctly, drives have a few spare blocks for minimal repair. But once those run out, no repair. And usually at that point the drive is headed downhill fast anyway.

[lacywest]

You didn't say how long you've had this laptop ... with this drive ... the drive in my Dell Laptop ... became unreadable without any warning and even though I used a bunch of external USB drives for DVD processing ... I did have some Excel documents on my Dell Laptop drive that seems to have been only on the drive and I really didn't want to lose them ... but I did

Before it is too late ... you should replace the drive ASAP ... really.

Bad sectors ... means ... usually ... the drive is getting old and is not able to compensate for wear and tear and the heads are starting to scrape the platters inside the drive enclosure.