# Unmarking Bad Sectors



## Fleekar (Apr 8, 2008)

So the other day I ran scandisk on my 300gb external Buffalo(Maxtor) hard drive. I had just finished burning a bunch of DVDs from it. I had about 40gb of free space. After running it with the options to automatically fix errors and attempt recovery of bad sectors, I suddenly found my HD full the next day when trying to copy files into it. Did a chkdsk and found that ALL 40 of those gigs became marked as bad sectors and were no longer accessible. I'm quite sure the HD is fine as I still continue to use it and the sectors have not increased in the past few days. I think it was an error on scandisk's part.

So now I'm wondering how to unmark or remove those bad sectors to make them available again without having to reformat. So far I'm using HDD regenerator 1.51 as I've heard it can recover them but it is extremely slow. It's able to scan about 1 gb every 1.5 hours. Scanning the whole thing would take almost 3 weeks. Of course I'll use it as an option but is there a faster way? Or at least a way to find the sectors since the program can start wherever u specify. That way I won't have to scan over clean sectors. So far I've only gone through 10 gb in the past 2 days and it has found nothing yet.

If my drive is indeed on route toward total failure I might just buy a new external and put this one away after transferring files, but I'm thinking that isn't the case.


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## W1zzard (Apr 8, 2008)

40 gb of bad sectors has a cause other than actual bad sectors.

is scandisk even supposed to work on external drives?

can you put the disk into your pc and check if it shows the errors there too ?

if yes, RMA


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