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Scandisk runs a long time – how long should it take?

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The size of your drive may affect how long scandisk takes to run, but an unusual amount of time may signal an additional problem.

Scandisk found some bad sectors on my hard disk but it is
taking too long to mark them – days just to mark 24 clusters. Is there
any faster way? Is there any disk utility that can mark bad sectors
faster?

You didn’t say how big the drive is, but “days” is way out of line, even for
scandisk.

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This resource on computing.net has a bunch of ideas,
in particular “never finishes”. The basic issue is that scandisk will keep
restarting if another process touches the disk while scandisk does its
job.

For really tough problems, a great tool I’ve used recently for hard disk
recovery and repair is SpinRite, from Gibson Research.
Norton System Works is another alternate tool. Both may do a better job than
scandisk.

But if it’s not your boot drive, it might be faster overall and cheaper to
reformat. Backup your data, reformat the drive making sure to do a thorough
reformat, not ‘quick format’, and then restore the data.

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