skip bad sectors and/or speed up, how?

[Ogg]

Just acquired SR a few days ago. Running in on a 500GB WD hdd, at level 2. Sofar SR is 73.5 hrs in. Estimated 9963hrs remaining (1.134 yrs!) Is there a way o significantly increase the speed of operation? I suppose using the command line to limit DynaStat to 1 minute could help, but that would still be several months of operation. Is there another/better way?

BTW.. a little background on the hdd. It was used in a Win7 32bit system. One day it it simply refused to load Windows. Windows Recovery disk (via CD boot) would not cooperate - it would always stall/freeze after the "Select language.." prompt.

 

[DanR]

@Ogg Have you considered a Level 1 scan? Level 1 is normal reads only (NO data recovery) and would "map' the drive via the GSD (Graphical Status Display) screen. It is fast and could provide an idea of the drives health.

Then . . . If data recovery is NOT a concern - The answer is: Yes (maybe)

Try dynastat 0 on the command line: C:>\spinrite dynastat 0

With DynaStat 0 no data recovery wilt be attempted. Just one normal read. If that fails, then write all zeros to the sector. This will eliminate all data recovery attempts and time. Typically the drive firmware will reallocate any bad sectors that will not write.

However, if the drive is really bad, this may not work. In which case the drive is likely toast.

 

[peterblaise]

If the data may be important, you can also try:

SPINRITE NORAMTEST LEVEL 2 DYNASTAT 1 NOREWRITE

DynaStat 1 tells SpinRite to spend no more than 1 minute
trying to recover each sector's unreadable data, the default
is 5 minutes per unreadable sector.

NoRewrite tells SpinRite NOT to rewrite any incompletely
recovered sector, leaving it as is to be tried again later - this
preserves an incompletely read sector for inspection by
any other means, instead of writing over it with 'best guess'
approximations.

Also, R&R remove and reinstall the circuit card on the drive,
and clean the inner contacts between the card and the drive
- any corrosion there will compromise drive data recovery
behavior:

.