Sector Blocking on Hitachi HD

[dbdood]

Hey doodz,

I am try to block bad sectors on my internal Hitachi HTS543225L9SA02 HDD. I installed the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (https://www1.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm) vendor software to a bootable USB. Here's the problems:

1. My dvdr drive doesn't work, so getting to bootable menu with MacOSX CD is not an option.

2. I don't know how to boot by a USB any other way.

3. I don't have a friend with a mac to do whatever over firewire or smth.

4. Steve Jobs doesn't return my emails.

Am I going about this the right way? Is there any third party software that could do this in the OS, or is that a ridiculous wish?

Thanks in advance

 

[dbdood]

so, i downloaded Techtool Pro 5, which helped me to find I have 144 bad sectors. It doesn't seem to be able to do anything else, since I haven't partitioned the drive and it won't touch the startup volume.

I read up on some more forums, and found this advice:

http://macosx.com/forums/mac-os-x-system-mac-software/46083-how-check-bad-blocks.html

They basically say that the most common cure is "to erase the drive with the write zeroes option which works as long as there are enough spare data blocks available to remap the bad blocks to."

It also says to see if S.M.A.R.T. is verified in Disk Utility, and it is. So, I guess I'm in somewhat OK shape. As good as 144 bad sectors can be.

Anyways, I have a list of the bad sectors, so if anyone else has a bright idea of how to mark them, please share