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Repairing bad sectors in an external drive
(discuss.tchncs.de)
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Tell the drive to do a secure erase. If there are still bad blocks after that, it is absolutely garbage
Frankly you should never see bad blocks, but sometimes minor bad things happen and the drive has to tell you that this data is gone forever. If you write over those bad blocks at some point, the drive is supposed to remap them to spare blocks and carry on as if everything is okay. If it has run out of spare blocks, then the bad blocks stay forever. A secure erase might give the drive more wiggle room to re-allocate around a larger bad spot, IDK.