Toshiba disk with bad sectors

Hello NG

What do you do with a Toshiba 2,5'' ATA disk drive with some bad
sectors ? There is no way to make a low level format with bad sector
management like for hitachi / ibm disks ?
So you have to throw it away if it has some bad blocks ?

Thank you for your time and help

Florian

In article
, Florian
Zschocke wrote:

> Hello NG
>
> What do you do with a Toshiba 2,5'' ATA disk drive with some bad
> sectors ? There is no way to make a low level format with bad sector
> management like for hitachi / ibm disks ?

there is no way to low level format any ata/ide drive outside of the
factory. utilities that claim to do low level formatting usually just
zero all blocks. ata/ide drives remap bad sectors on a write, so
zeroing all blocks in effect will remap all bad sectors (assuming there
is a spare available for it to be remapped), but this is not the same
as a low level format, which is what actually defines the sectors on a
completely blank platter.

> So you have to throw it away if it has some bad blocks ?

depends how many. an occasional bad sector is no big deal, but if you
have more than that, the should be replaced. it is certainly better to
replace the drive *before* you put important data on it...

launch disk utility and try erasing it with the option to zero all
blocks selected. hopefully that buys you some time, but personally, i
would not trust it anymore.