Hello.
In the old days, you could "mark" bad disk sectors so that they wouldn't be used.
Nowadays, the disk is managed by a microcontroller on the drive itself, and that microcontroller keeps track of bad sectors and "swaps in" good sectors from a reserve pool. It works great as long as there are sectors left in the reserve pool.
But when that "reserve pool" is depleted, the OS churns along and merrily tries to write to bad sectors.
So my question is: are there any tools out there for Windows which can be used to scan the disk and "allocate" any bad sectors into a hidden file so that the OS doesn't try to write to (or read from) them?
Please, hold the suggestions about getting a new disk etc etc. This is for cost-free reviving of serviceable old laptop computers to be used for non-critical tasks.