Topic: Hard drives with bad sectors

[LobbDogg]

I've got this 250gb sata drive with a few bad sectors on it, Im planning on trying to low level format it, and to try and get some use out of it. Does this usually work? and has anyone ever noticed that the drive started to develop more and more bad sectors over time or any data corruption issues after putting data on it?

[MegaHz]

its possible, I'd recomend spinrite from GRC.com, see what it thinks about the drives, and how close they are to death.

[Nicao]

Depends,  if the drive has been suddenly powered of or bumped while spinning it could have some false positives on it and it will work just fine.  However if it is a really defective drive the best way of getting some extra use out of it is to partition around the bad sectors.  Low level formatting is really only effective if the bad sectors are false positives.

[VE6JHC]

Once the sectors have been marked as bad Windows does not write data to that sector anymore.