Hard Disk Bad Sectors!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what would you say after seeing this…
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Pretty crappy right? I scanned it for more than 6 hours in my 5 year old “slow and terrible” CPU and this is what it looked like after 75% of the disk is scanned. So here is the deal, I bought this Seagate 80GB IDE hard drive in tipidpc (just like ebay) and the seller told me that he wants to sell the hard drive for only 200Php (around 5 us dollars), he also said that the disk is functioning but with a slight defect, it has TWO block of bad sectors! I just bought this thinking it was really a bargain.

I was thinking I could fix the bad sectors by just wiping down the whole disk using “low level format tools”. I didn’t know the bad sectors we’re caused by faulty and physically damaged disc sectors maybe due to excessive shock to the hard drive. I was disappointed to know that so many bad blocks are present. I have fixed bad sectors before on my other hard drive so I was so optimistic about this one. I started wiping and completely erasing the disk beyond recovery using different tools for about 2 days. believe me, I left my pc running for 2 days! I just figured out that the electricity it cost to Assumably fix this crap was more than the bargain deal it cost me to buy this.
After A few tries and complete wiping the disk here’s the end result.


The Bad sectors Cannot be fixed because it is a physical damage on specific areas on the hard drive, It took me more than 8 hours to scan this after my thoroug wiping. To my dismay I almost threw this hard drive out of the window of my room.
Pause muna. . I took a merienda break…
After a yummy Merienda of Coffee Barako and Pandesal from KABAYAN BAKERY. I figured out that I can just remove the part with bad sectors by grouping the bad sectors in a hidden partition so that I wouldn’t have to use it anymore. (sacrificing even the good blocks near around the bad blocks). It was my last resort.
It looks like this.


The Blue Outline will become the hidden partition because it contains areas of bad sectors in it. Each block is 30MB, and the damaged block is 3.2% of the whole disk.
The Black Outline will become the usable partition. I ended up partitioning 30GB out of 76GB to be hidden, and only 46GB usable.
46GB usable disk area out of 80GB SEAGATE IDE HDD, I was able to successfully installed Windows 7 Ultimate in it and I am now using it. Happy ending story