Help Save Hard Drive Pls!

[plunar]

my wife tripped up the power cord on my powerbook g4, busted up the frame real beautiful like. with some patience i was able to make it look like new again, but then they started cropping up....

the odd song in itunes giving me a spinning beach ball, the obscure disk error trying to copy certain files...

okay, so the drop gave me a few bad blocks. no biggie. i'll back up the rest (fortunately, only a couple crap albums and last years homework seemed to be messed up; photos and movies were safe), and zero the drive. i figure the s.m.a.r.t. thing will seal off my newly rottened blocks.

well, disk utility timed-out about 20% through a zero-format of the drive.

i am freaking too poor to buy a new hard drive.... i NEED this thing.... i can't be having the drive trying to write to bad sectors. given that i backed up nearly 60 gigs of files off this 80gb drive AFTER the fall, i know the baddies can't account for that much of the drive... but i can't risk having the drivehead sometime in the future hitting something it shouldn't and losing my work. what can i do??? why won't the zero format work?

 

[Krevnik]

Do realize that only so many bad blocks can be worked around before you start seeing failures like this. Once the drive can't work around any more bad blocks, you will be unable to use those blocks, and a zero of the drive will simply fail, as you have seen. This is because you 'write' to that block, but the value isn't what was written... so it errors, and then it tries to reassign the block, but can't, so it fails.

Unfortunately, it looks like the drive is beyond saving at this point. There are options in this situation for those on a tight budget... although for a Powerbook, those still tend to be more expensive than desktop drives.

 

[plunar]

isn't there some disk utility tool that can identify where the baddies are, and partition the drive so that those areas remain unformated?

 

[sejanus]

dude you are nuts. time to give up, get a new one. swallow the money.

you don't use a hard drive you know has damage - thats crazy

 

[Krevnik]

isn't there some disk utility tool that can identify where the baddies are, and partition the drive so that those areas remain unformated?

Nope... You would have to split partitions along EVERY bad block, and you are likely to have a slew of 20KB partitions, and maybe a couple usable ones a couple GB in size.

 

[Silentwave]

Your wife did it, make her pay

Seriously though, you're better off not risking it anyways even if it were feasible. You can get yourself a brand spanking new 2.5" ATA/100 80GB 5400RPM drive for as low as $66 on Newegg.