Acronis Disk Editor help mark bad sectors?

Hi,

I have a HDD of 120GB which had served me well for some years.

After some power accidents (before the time I had my UPS ) problems occured with the drive.

Part of the HDD is accessible at only VERY LOW speeds (<1MB/s up to 10-20KB/s, and sometimes even lower). Now I see that these areas are damaged somehow, but no disc scanner marks any sectors as bad.

Is there a way that using Acronis Disk Editor I might manually mark some sectors as bad.

If you come up with idea on how to isolate these areas (some burst chechking soft can show me where to start and stop) using some Acronis tool (known to be best), please say how.

Thanks.

(p.s. speaking of NTFS formatted drive)

 

Hello clmnw,

Thank you for your interest in Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

We regret to inform you that Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 doesn't allow you to mark custom sectors as bad so that operating system and application doesn't use them. Hwever, there is a workaround that may suit you. Since you know that bad sectors are in the end of the partition you may decrease the partition moving its end border. This will reduce the space you have but will prevent you from writing on bad area.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Thank you. I will work with that idea.

 

See my HDD speed test... and you will understand me that I cannot just move the partition (size) border, the bad speed spots are just anywhere...

http://img363.imageshack.us/img363/8377/hddshot29fw.jpg

I guess this piece of technique is just to be thrown to the bin (though I didn't want to do this to 120GB hdd)

 

Hello clmnw,

It seems that even if you could mark bad sectors it wouldn't be of help since there are too many of them. Probably, you still have warranty for the drive and the manufacturer can replace this disk with the new one. I think it's worth trying anyway.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

I zero-filled the whole drive, than I made partitions, doing FAT32 on the worse places and NTFS on the better (NTFS is more resource-consumable as far as I know).

After that, on a blank drive (4 clean partitions) I got speeds at about 20MB/s (with some exeptions slowing down to 1.8MB/s).

Will see how it will work with real data on it, and.. I put in External USB enclosure so I control how much of the time it is being used / heated (cause heat might be it's problem).

Anyway, thanks for the advices.