Re: Fixing a disk

[oaaland@aol.com (O Aaland)]

>From: "laserdog" <laserdog@scioto.net>

>Is there a way I can repair a disk?  I have Prosel 16, but when I run it, it
>says the disk has bad sectors.  I know that, but can it be fixed?



It depends on what you mean by fixed. If you are looking to recover data from
that area of the disk the chances are not good. I normally start by using the
finder to verify the disk. That will give me the block numbers that are bad. I
then use Block Warden from Prosel to try to read those blocks. Sometimes you
can read those blocks after a few tries and then once it is read try to write
it back to the disk. If after several attempts you still cannot re4ad the block
try reading another and write that back to the bad block. If that works then
you may be able to read the file and just have some corrupted data. Once you
have gotten as much data off the disk as possible you can then reformat it. If
there are still bad blocks the format will fail. To be able to salvage such a
disk I use Photonics to copy a blank disk to the bad disk. Photonics will just
skip bad blocks and continue the format process. After the disk is copied you
can then use Mr. Fixit from Prosel to test and repair the bad blocks. The
repair is a file written to the disk as a bad block file that is there to map
out the bad blocks. The rest of the disk will be useable as long as you do not
try to do a disk copy from it or try to copy the bad block file.

If you start by copying your bad disk with Photonics you can come up with a
disk where the files might be useable with zeros written to the blocks that
were not readable. That is probably the quickest way it the data can  be
reconstructed without too much trouble.

Owen