IDE drives are supposed to remap bad sectors transparently to the OS. You could try zero-wiping the drive (which will also wipe the FAT where it is keeping track of those sectors as bad) in hopes it might do that. It could be that there are so many bad areas on the drive it is out of spare sectors and can't remap anymore. Any true low level formatting of an IDE drive would be with proprietary vendor tools.

Old enough drives don't remap anything. Your best bet is to make a partition and do a full format on it, then existing bad sectors are marked out and won't be touched during normal activities. Any new bad sectors will be bad news though...

Try using HDAT2, it has a test that zero-wipes the drive as suggested above, in addition to re-reading and veryfing each sector. In many cases bad sectors are soft/logical, which is solved by re-writing them, so a wipe will fix them. On the other hand, if you start seeing uncorrectable bad sectors, those are physically bad (maybe due to damage of some sort) and once they start becoming common it may be sign that the drive is on its last legs.

Yes i have put the drive in recycle box 🙁 tnks anyway

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-08-31, 21:17:

Yes i have put the drive in recycle box 🙁 tnks anyway

Unless it has a lot of them I wouldn't say the drive is necessarily unusable or about to die. IIRC if scandisk detects the bad sector it will mark it as bad in the FAT and nothing will use it. So as long as the drive isn't developing new bad sectors as you use it, it may be fine. Realistically, any hard drive of that age is probably on its last legs bad sectors or not - if you've got backups of anything important I see no reason not to keep using it until it starts loosing data.

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-08-31, 21:17:

Yes i have put the drive in recycle box 🙁 tnks anyway

Make sense.
If it's the mechanics, or the chemistry on the disc that goes to hell, there's not much you can do...
In short, beyond 10 blocks you can consider that your disc will make a good clipboard or nice can of diet Coke 🤣

jakethompson1 wrote on 2022-08-31, 17:35:

Any true low level formatting of an IDE drive would be with proprietary vendor tools.

Likely true for this drive. Very old IDE drives (before zone recording, so mostly below 60MB) usually do implement the standard "format track" command and do not implement automatic remapping

An interesting data point is the Fujitsu M262 series. Those drives have four zones, so any geometry presented is definitely virtual. I own both a M2622 330MB SCSI drive as well as a M2624 520MB IDE/ATA drive. These drives have a dedicated servo surface, but seem to loose head alignment when the computer gets moved to a different location by car or train. They show "sector not found" errors, especially on writing after moving the PC, and it can be fixed by issuing a standard low-level format procedure (SCSI: format unit, IDE: format track for each track). I have no idea how they implemented track-wise low-level format when there is geometry translation, but the procedure already worked twice for me.

AlessandroB wrote on 2022-08-31, 17:05:

I have an old 810Mb Conner that has several bad sectors (MiniTool Partition Wizard detects 30), is there a low-level format method that excludes these sectors and prevents the disk from using them forever? tnks

low level IDE format: Re: Got HDD, "format c trying to recover allocation unit" issues, ran ScanDisk and WDigital Diagnostic, no issues found?
Back in the day making an invisible partition over the region with bad sectors was pretty popular and cheap way of avoiding the problem 😀 This worked pretty good as long as defect was localized. Nowadays storage is reasonably cheap, but there are still people dabbling with bad drives. For example modern tool to mark whole regions of clusters as bad: https://github.com/jamersonpro/ntfsmarkbad
I think russian acelab pioneered HD repair business https://www.acelab.eu.com/news/pc-3000-25-yea … f-data-recovery I dont know of anyone else doing it before them. You can use PC-3000 to edit HDD internal tables and remap bad sectors permanently and invisibly to the user. You can also erase bad SMART status from defective drives.