How to check brand new 2TB drive for bad sectors?

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Level 1

5 points

How to check brand new 2TB drive for bad sectors?

Bought a new 2TB drive. I usually just use Disk Utility to initialize my disks & name them, which takes only a minute.

I read somewhere that one should instead do an "erase free space" in Disk Utility instead to force OS X to write the entire disk & this way map out all the bad sectors.

is this really the best & recommended practice? or can i just continue to do it the way i used to?

ps: is there a free utility that can tell me about bad sectors? (i have SMARTReporter, but it provides no details on PPC systems)

Mac G5, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jul 13, 2010 2:56 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Jul 13, 2010 3:05 PM in response to raka

I wouldn't bother. Just erase and format the HD to meet your machine's requirements, which means using the Apple Partition Map scheme, since I read Mac G5 as being a PPC model.

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Answer 2

Kurt Lang

Level 9

58,152 points

Jul 13, 2010 4:20 PM in response to raka

is there a free utility that can tell me about bad sectors?

If by "tell" you mean will it report them, no, I can't think of any free ones. At least not for the Mac that I've been able to find. There are some free ones for Windows. Commercial Mac software such as Tech Tool Pro and Drive Genius will test a drive for bad sectors. If it finds any, it will tell you. Then you know you need to do a zero erase of the drive with Disk Utility to map them out.

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Answer 3

Andreas

Level 4

1,510 points

Jul 13, 2010 5:09 PM in response to raka

Follow the advice above by Baltwo. Ignoring any references to Carbon Copy Cloner, see the “ Zeroing, 'bad blocks' and Surface Scans” section in Journaling, Zeroing, Partitioning.

Andreas

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