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I use HD Tune pro error scan to find problems with mechanical hard drives. However, I am confused as to weather these are fixable problems or not. Please clarify weather my statements are accurate:

Zero-Fill (manufacturer utility): Can permanently fix the drive by moving bad sectors with reserve space on the drive?

Full-Format: Can hide problems temporarily by marking blocks as bad in the filesystem? (this will be undone by a quick format)

Chkdsk (full scan): Same as a full format for marking purposes?

Comments regarding the danger of using drives with questionable sectors are outside the scope of this question

cloneman
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  • You cannot *"fix"* bad sectors that have been reallocated by the controller. Only bad sectors marked by the filesystem can be manipulated. See https://www.mjm.co.uk/bad-sector-remapping.html – sawdust Nov 01 '16 at 18:34

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Zero Fill writes the disk with Zero's. It does not move data around, it tries to delete it ! You probably can't zero out bad sectors though, so it does not always get all the data (but will get almost all of it).

Full Format - Checks drive for errors and maps around those.

Chkdsk - looks for, and attempts to correct file system corruption. Depending on the filesystem and chkdsk utility this may or may not mark sectors bad.

You are missing an option - Low Level Disk format - this will remap the bad sectors at the lowest level of the disk. This is what you need to do if you are trying to fix a damaged disk.

Its a bit concerning that you assert bad that comments about the danger of using drives without questionable sectors is outside the scope of this question. This is really key - as only someone who does not understand, does care about their data, or if onselling, there reputation, would even consider doing anything with a hard drive developing bad sectors other then pull the data off and replacing it.

davidgo
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  • I guess I used the word Zero-Fill wrong. I was using Hitachi's WinDFT's "ERASE" button. Is this called a low-level format? This is not something an OS can do natively, right? – cloneman Nov 01 '16 at 08:40
  • @cloneman, just to add to this, your point about a quick format undoing a full format is incorrect. Also, CHKDSK can attempt to relocate data and lock out bad sectors if you use the `/R` parameter. – fixer1234 Nov 01 '16 at 17:57
  • *"You are missing an option - Low Level Disk format"* -- That's not a user capability on modern ATA drives. ATAPI doesn't even have an explicit seek command any more! The only "format" is a filesystem creation procedure that simply performs normal sector writes. – sawdust Nov 01 '16 at 18:27
  • @sawdust, you're right that the original meaning of low level format doesn't apply any more, but the term is still used to refer to the process that includes writing 0s to the disk. When that's done, doesn't the controller check for bad sectors and lock them out? – fixer1234 Nov 01 '16 at 20:00
  • @sawdust I agree that end users can't format ATA drives, but the drives are still low-level formatted by the factory- as the question is way in the scope of "fiction" from any responsible persons POV, it made sense to throw it in for completion. (Also, your comment makes a very reasonable, but not necessarily correct assumption as to what type of disk is being talked about) – davidgo Nov 01 '16 at 20:24
  • @fixer1234 *"doesn't the controller check for bad sectors and lock them out?"* -- Zero-fill or "formatting" for a filesystem use ordinary write operations. There's no automatic verify or read after write, but there would have to be a read in order to detect a bad sector. So I would not expect any change in the bad sector lists maintained by the controller. – sawdust Nov 02 '16 at 07:01