Disk management software

[Gef]

I have two disks that are now showing (At risk) in the windows disk manager, I have tried running scandisk but its a big pile of crap and never finishes.

Anyone reccomment some really DECENT software? I have had reccomendations before and they have all turned out to cause more problems than good.

How difficult can it be for some software to locate and isolate a bad sector and then avoid it like the plague in future. I have a hankering to set up a linux box just for data storage.

I think the problem is one of the disks is faulty, it starts generating errors when it gets to 80% full ish, then when I move files off it to a different disk those errors get copied across.

Cruddy hard disks, bane of my life.

 

[anattic]

I don't think there's any software that's really going to help - to be honest, it sounds like the disks are on the way out. The problem may not actually be damage to the platters, but something more mechanical (head failing, head-servo failing, stiction, bearing going etc.).

Both the HD and the file-system (unless very ancient) will attempt to isolate bad blocks on write as part of their normal operation. If the block goes bad on the read (and you have no redundancy i.e. RAID), then the data is likely to be unrecoverable.

As a matter of interest, what manufacturer/size of disks are they?

 

[Gef]

Two disks, one is quite old, maybe 4 years, think its a Maxtor 120Gb, the other is about 12 months old, 300Gb Western Digital. Its the newer one that is the most serious I think.

The thing is I reformatted them about 6 months ago after they had been in an old machine I was using as a file server. They died a horrible death after a couple of weeks, but that machine has chewed up and spat out more disks than I care to mention. Its now been decomissioned and branded a liablity (I think the IDE on the motherboard is shot).

I put the 3 reformatted disks into a brand new machine and they have been happy for half a year. Once the 300Gb starts nearing its full state it pops up write errors.

My plan was to wait a while till I got some spare cash and buy a couple of new disks, put everything on those and send the 300Gb back to WD for replacement. But the errors seem to have crept onto another disk now after copying some data across from the defunct one.