Checking a hard disk for bad sectors?

[usuario]

Hi everyone,

Is there a way to check my hard disk for bad sectors? I dropped my MacBook off a 2nd floor balcony onto grass and I don't want to get a nasty surprise sometime in the future when it tries to write to a bad sector.

Please don't say fsck because there's nothing wrong with the file system because I dropped it when it was off.

 

[Intell]

I don't think there is any built in way on Macs. But what people have done is securely erase the whole disc in Disk Utility by writing zeros to the whole disc.

 

[dodds]

Checking a hard disk for bad sectors?

Hi everyone,

Is there a way to check my hard disk for bad sectors? I dropped my MacBook off a 2nd floor balcony onto grass and I don't want to get a nasty surprise sometime in the future when it tries to write to a bad sector.

Please don't say fsck because there's nothing wrong with the file system because I dropped it when it was off.

TEchtools Pro 5 makes this test, called surface test ; it can take some time, I am presently testing a 1 To disk, Il started on last Friday afternoon, today a quarter only of the disk has been tested...
But OS X does not verify after writing a sectoir if the rresult was correct.
And Techtool Pro does not identify for OS X the bad sectors.
So after this test, anyway, the interest is to really invaliate the bas sectors, and this is only feasible :
- either by erasing completely the disk, which needs to save the contents if it is possiblef
- eiither by building temporarily folders and duplicate them, then selectiing one of the duplicate, putting it in the trash and "emptying the trash in security mode". In my case, the existing data take half of the 1 To, making twice this operation can detect the bas sectoirs of nearly all the disk