I am afraid, no.
Iirc, the bad sector is in a cluster, and unless the cluster size is same as sector size, the whole cluster becomes invalid.
If the drive already supports SMART, let it have a long destructive test to map out bad sectors.

No, a bad cluster/bad sector is a spot on the hard drive that has permanently lost the ability to hold data, most often through physical damage caused by dust, heat, physical shock, or simple loss of the ability for that spot on the surface to hold a magnetic signal due to age. Once this happens, it's there forever and cannot be fixed. The only thing that can be done is to have that cluster or sector marked as unusable, so the OS will never write anything there.

If you plan on continuing to use the drive, definitely keep an eye on it. Run ScanDisk or ChkDsk regularly to make sure the damage isn't spreading.

torindkflt wrote:

.... The only thing that can be done is to have that cluster or sector marked as unusable, so the OS will never write anything there.

And formating the drive (attention: NOT quick formatimg) does just that. So, by formating it in the first place (a normal format, not a quick one), you already did everything you can.

A 500 MB drive is actually quite old (definately not supporting SMART) and during older times (when consumer grade HDDs were 40-80MB capacity) having a few bad sectors even on a brand new drive was considered normal (HDDs was coming with bad sectors listed on their labels).

Tools such as SpinRite exist, although agree an old 500MB drive is probably fair enough to have a bad sector or 2 after all these years, run a scan over the next few weeks and if no more are detected I wouldn't worry.

What does everyone think of HDAT2 from Hirens boot cd? It has a read only for bad clusters/sectors so you dont have to loose any data when OP re-scans it later though I dont know about SpinRite as ive not used it before.

Yes, It’s NOT a smart drive and Scandisk has already marked the Cluster as BAD. So it won’t be used again.
I remember my old hard drives having BAD sectors too. Luckily this drive only has 1 bad cluster.
Still has 518mb. Usable.

tayyare wrote:

patch-to-repair-a-broken-hard-drive-stock-image_csp7499996[1].jpg

So that's what this thread was for!