MBR to a new position

[Pedro]

Hi all,

I have an external 2.5" hard disk (320Gb) which has gone corrupted several months ago apparently for no reason. It is no longer recognized by Windows. HDD Regenerator detects a lot of bad sectors (including sector zero) but fails to recover them. EASEUS partition master allowed me to save some useful information, but I would also like to save the disk itself.
I have another internal 3.5" hard disk (bearing windows and Linux systems in different partitions) that has started messaging errors, warning to save critical data before it goes completely bad.

In those cases:
- what can be done?
- is it possible to move the MBR to another location of the disk, out of the bad sectors region?
- what software can be used to do that?

Thanks guys

[Tom]

The conventional way to deal with disks going bad is to clone them, and then (if needed) perform file recovery on the cloned disks. It is possible to forego the cloning and start recovering files directly from the bad disks, but this is generally not preferred. iRecover however is capable of dealing with read errors while recovering files that may not be copied from the damaged disk normally.
If you can copy files from the disk(s) as is, do that, and replace the disks if possible. Depending on the error type and the amount of errors you could try a read/write surface scan (to force the bad sectors to be swapped with good sectors by the disk's error handling).
It is not possible to place the MBR on another sector. The only way to deal with that situation is to clone the disk and re-create the MBR on the cloned disk.

[Pedro]

Thanks Tom. I have already saved the data, but I guess I lost the disk then.

Anyway I would like to try MBR tool, and see if I can do something about it. If not repairing it, at least zero filling the MBR and create a new one to make the disk usable.

thanks again,
Pedro

[Joep]

Hello,

You can't zero fill a sector you can not write to. If sector zero is 'bad' and can not be read from nor written to (because the disk used up all its spares), then you can not make the disk usable. The MBR IS sector zero because your PC BIOS assumes it is sector zero. See: http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/kb_mbr_article.htm. Since HDD regenarator can not fix sectors it is safe to assume the disk used all its spare sectors.