Scandisk found some bad sectors on my hard disk but it is
taking too long to mark them â days just to mark 24 clusters. Is there
any faster way? Is there any disk utility that can mark bad sectors
faster?
You didnât say how big the drive is, but âdaysâ is way out of line, even for
scandisk.
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This resource on computing.net has a bunch of ideas,
in particular ânever finishesâ. 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 Iâve 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 itâs 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 âquick formatâ, and then restore the data.