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HDD2ndLife Icon

Give your HDD one last job with "Removed Bad Sector Degredation Areas" via Marked Unusable Partitioning Scheme.

What is this ?

As hard Drives get used their "reallocatable sectors" become used up, therefore the disk "wears out". The idea behind this application, is to find these "wear spots" and remove them from useable space via the use of partitions at a high level.

Why?

This is just to allow data that does not change often to be stored on a hard drive, for backup purposes. Do not assume that the drive will remain "happy" during further R/W cycles, just that it can be used as a snapshot for Software raid, or even just as a removeable copy disk.

But HDD's are cheap!

Yes, and No. If you have invested money in a large disk, and you just want to throw it away, then fine (Recycle it!). This application, just allows you to get more "Return On Your Invest", before the physical recycle process is needed.

How does it work?

  • It lists the disks with information about them
  • It then allows you to select a disk
  • Once selected it will allow a Surface test to be performed to see if there are "Bad Sectors"
  • Then it will allow you to perform a partitioning scheme to "hide" the wear areas away from the useable space on your disk

Aren't "Bad Sectors" created by power failure writes ?

Yes they can be, and as such they can be recovered by performing a write over, but if the "SMART" data flags of the hard drive are signalling any "Uncorrectable Sector Counts" or high "Reallocated Sector Counts", then this is an indication of the disk wearing out at those locations. There are two types of bad sectors — often divided into “physical” and “logical” bad sectors or “hard” and “soft” bad sectors.

The Partitioning Scheme - Is it data destructive ?

Yes it will be !

There's another tool that does this, Why have you written yours ?

I used to use that other tool, but when the HDD's got above 1TB, then the calculations for progress and completion becoma nonsense (i.e. -1000998765% to complete). It also did not have a very interactive display, which did not show the areas that would be excluded, when entering partition scheme values (they had to be entered before starting).

I have heard that a Low-Level Format makes things work

I've heard that as well, and I have tried it on drives that start to report SMART count errors, But it always seems that the warnings go away, and then the drive fails anyway, just when you don't want it to, which means that your data has been in jepordy twice (1st time to identify that a LLFormat is required, then again with the sudden failure!)

Further reading:

Roadmap:

  • Phase I
    • Start this Site
    • Add basic drive details list
    • Allow Disk selection and open form
    • List details to include current partitions
    • Show existing Partitioning

  • Phase II
    • More details from windows WMI
    • Create Control for options, feedback, progress, etc.
    • Allow basic disk scan
    • Add feedback (time to complete, speed, etc.)
    • Detailed scan UI blocks -> failed / reading / writing / verifying / passed / unused
    • Test that the updates and UI interactions are not slowing down the throughput of scans.       [<- in progress]
    • Attempt Basic RePartitioning (e.g. Min Distance from bad blocks to be ignored)
    • Start Documentation       [<- in progress]

  • Phase III
    • Display (And use) information about the "Slow reads / writes" which can be used to determine a "weakened" block which may indicate signs of wear.
    • More Detailed UI showing relative Partition locations (& types ?)
    • Allow selections for Partitioning scheme
    • Extended Partitiong Schemes
    • Other features I haven't thought of yet ;-)
    • [ ]

Will not be done:

  • S.M.A.R.T Details
    • Turns out that trying to get this work on just the few machines that I have is a pain.
    • WMI does not work with
      • Raid controllers
      • PCIExpress SSD controllers that use their own drivers (Even the latest smartmon tools do not work with them, but the older version does!)
    • Crystal Disk Info does a really good job !
    • Your using this app because you know that the drive is failing !