A problem with harddrives

[melott]

I have a problem with harddrives & manufactures.

Generally when a drive has more than 10% bad blocks
the drive is considered bad. With the size of the
newer drives now ie. 20, 30, 50, or 150 gigs why
throw one out if there is still plenty of room for
what you are doing with it.
I have a 6 gig laptop drive and I only want to use
between 3 and 4 gigs. I keep most of my important
files backed up on CD.
So my question is ... is there a prg. that will scan
and mark the bad sections of a drive and allow you to
use the rest of the drive?? The beginning of the drive
where the BAM is is OK, It has some bad tracks toward
the middle of the drive.
I've tried 'MyFormat' but that doesn't seem to do the
job, it gets to a bad section and just hangs there.
With trial and error I can figure out which blocks are
bad and partition them as a bad partition.
It just seems a shame to throw out a drive when there
is still plenty of usable space.

[melott]

This 6.5 gig drive .... it has 2 bad spots.
The first bad spot is about 200 megs in and about
30 megs long. The second is at about 3 gigs in and
again about 30 megs long.
I don't know what happened to cause this problem
but it seems a shame to throw it away when so much
of the drive is still usable. I have figured this
out by watching 'MyFormat' where it hangs-up.
I can partition these bad spots and just not use
them but it seem to me there should be a way to
just mark the bad spots and not include them in
a format. WorseFormat sais it does that and unless
you do a total reformat on the drive the bad block
list should survive (I think).
But then I don't know for sure (only guessing)
 

[melott]

@PIRU....
I was refering to the list created by WorseFormat
not the internal BadBlock list created by the drive itself.

BTW is there a prg. that lets you look at the BadBlock
list ?? I'm interested now and would like to see if its
full or what.

@pVC
I'm going to check ABTools out if its on Aminet.
I'm using FFS and I don't like partitions larger
than 2 gigs. Usually 1 gig or less.

[melott]

@pVC

The update patches are on Aminet but not the prg.

I probably have it, I ran a BBS many years ago and
have hunderds of disks that I haven't looked at in
years. If I get ambishious I'll look for it.
Could take hours to go through the disks.

[melott]

@pVC

The update patches are on Aminet but not the prg.

I probably have it, I ran a BBS many years ago and
have hunderds of disks that I haven't looked at in
years. If I get ambishious I'll look for it.
Could take hours to go through the disks.