Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-11-12, 18:16:

I don’t know what the difference is between a Yellow colored BAD Clusters and a RED colored BAD Cluster?

Yellow vs Cyan is a progress indication, with yellow being processed and cyan is the ones to be processed.
Yellow Bs are processed blocks with some bad clusters in it. The red Bs that are still within cyan area - those are already known bad clusters, the FAT table already has those blocks marked as bad, so it's known even before scanning, and would not be allocated for files.

Can these BAD Clusters be fixed ?
If so how ?

Usually they are marked as BAD because they are BAD. Something written on such sector won't be stored properly and reading such data will be corrupted.

If HDD has many bad sectors it isn't safe to use for normal operation as data already written can be corrupted and unusable.

If you don't care about the data, you can use it till it fails completely.

Yes, It’s a New Old Stock hard drive from 1997 so it has not seen allot of use.

If you believe the bad sectors are mistake done by scandisk because of some intermittent issues (bad PSU, bad contacts in cables), then you can try to format the disk with 'format', just do not use quick format. There should be command line option about retesting the bad sectors (/C). Sure only after you've done some servicing to ensure you do not have those external issues anymore.

You can try something like "badblocks -s -v -w /dev/hda" - it overwrites the entire disk with various patterns, several times, which may force relocation of the bad sectors.
But don't expect miracles...

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/vict … or_windows.html
but most likely its a bad drive, good source of magnets

The OP is a supposedly a long time "IT Professional" from Silicon Valley so should know the answers to the questions he is asking.....

He has also posted stock images from the internet of systems he has supposedly owns/ owned. This has been verified by other members numerous times in the past. Be aware of this before replying to ANY of his posts.

Thanks for your reply’s guys. I am not an expert on hard drive recovery software, tools and techniques.
Yes, I have worked with fair amount of hard drives in the past. Usually it was old Conner, Matrox, Seagate, and Quantum
Hard drives that gave me problems in the past. I have always had good luck with IBM and HGST drives.
Maybe that is why they were used in servers by some of the Top computer server manufactures.
WD drives have been very reliable too. Maybe that is why Apple used WD drives.
I did try to repair the heads on a drive once and that did not turn out well.
So I was wondering if there was any new software out there or techniques to fix these old drives with bad clusters.
I hate to have to throw them away as I have allot of them that are starting to fail now.
Also I have drives with stuck heads that click. Any way to fix that ?

Intel486dx33 wrote on 2022-11-13, 11:39:

Thanks for your reply’s guys. I am not an expert on hard drive recovery software, tools and techniques. Yes, I have worked with […]
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Thanks for your reply’s guys. I am not an expert on hard drive recovery software, tools and techniques.
Yes, I have worked with fair amount of hard drives in the past. Usually it was old Conner, Matrox, Seagate, and Quantum
Hard drives that gave me problems in the past. I have always had good luck with IBM and HGST drives.
Maybe that is why they were used in servers by some of the Top computer server manufactures.
WD drives have been very reliable too. Maybe that is why Apple used WD drives.
I did try to repair the heads on a drive once and that did not turn out well.
So I was wondering if there was any new software out there or techniques to fix these old drives with bad clusters.
I hate to have to throw them away as I have allot of them that are starting to fail now.
Also I have drives with stuck heads that click. Any way to fix that ?

Nope, many old drives had these bad blocks right out of the factory and had them allocated as such. You can’t repair them, you can retest but the chances of that block recovering is slim and it will likely fail again.

As for drive repairs, unless you have a clean room setup internal repairs are pointless and costly. Stuck heads can be fixed rarely and don’t recover long before failing again.

I've had some success with Spinrite many years ago, that was when I was on company time with company money though.
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

Personally for my old gaming rigs a few bad sectors aren't going to hurt anyone, just run a scan every now and then to make sure they aren't multiplying .