Stuck at Startup Checks - disk health

[confab]

I have a laptop with 2 hard drives. One of the hard drives has several bad sectors, but is otherwise fine. It boots windows and runs normally. However, it has 12 pending sectors. It has 2 reallocated sectors, so I assume the drive correctly remapped those.

I want to use diskpatch's read/write surface scan to force the hd to remap the pending sectors (SMART indicates there are plenty of available sectors).

I downloaded and burned Diskpatch 3.5 to a CD. It boots fine. I choose the option of not loading the DMA driver (as per your manual as both notebook drives are SATA).

It then does the disk check and loads to the main menu. I select Start DiskPatch option. It then does the startup checks. The program gives a green checkmark for UDMA driver, but then does nothing. I'm not sure how long the disk health check is supposed to take, but I left it on for a few hours and it seems stuck there.

I then reboot the system and use the troubleshooting option to disable general checks. It then brings me to the main menu. I click select disk and then select the disk I wish disk0 (the drive with pending sectors). It then gives a popup that says Reading Disk... Unfortunately, it remains stuck on that popup. Again, I'm not sure how long it is suppose to take, but it remains at that point for several hours.

I can't create a support analysis log file. When I select that option, it does the startup checks and remains stuck at disk health check.

Please advise. Thanks for your help.

[Joep]

Hello,

The item disk health when running DiskPatch does not run the disk check, it just checks if it was run prior to starting DiskPatch. Can we see a disk health report if you try like this: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/dp_manual/guide_smartcheck.htm

I then reboot the system and use the troubleshooting option to disable general checks. It then brings me to the main menu. I click select disk and then select the disk I wish disk0 (the drive with pending sectors). It then gives a popup that says Reading Disk... Unfortunately, it remains stuck on that popup.

The disk may be in a worse shape than you assume based upon the 12 pending sectors. Those pending sectors are the ones the disk has discovered so far, it does not guarantee they're the only ones. For a disk to discover 'bad' sectors a read sector command has to be issued or a SMART self check must be run.

Regarding DiskPatch 'hanging' (it is not actually hanging, it is waiting): When in the startmenu 'quit' out of it. start DiskPatch manually using: dp /dnc /npf [enter], or use the troubleshooting menu ("skip both disk and general checks"). It should then get you to the next menu after you select a disk.