Drive Surface Scan for Drive Health Analysis Report

While working on the Mac have you heard any abnormal sound or seen unwanted system message? If yes there could be bad blocks in your Mac hard drive!

Scanning hard drive is the smart way to check health of hard drive. The process will start scanning from one sector and continue till end. After completing the process it will provides you whole information about the bad blocks (its sector and size), if any. However with this process bad block are not deallocated from its current location but you can get knowledge about them only.

What if hard drive fails the surface scan test?

If test fails that means your hard drive have bad blocks! No worries, its not that much complicated you can handle this also. Only point is if any data present in that particular sector unfortunately it will gonna lost!! Rest here are some bullet point for you:

Take proper backup of data: For this purpose create image of data using disk utility or any trusted third party tool such as Stellar Drive Clone. Why I am saying image its because for imaging it will read data sector by sector leaving the bad blocks behind. So this way you can get image of your whole data in the form of “.dmg”

Wipe: It is required because when we simply delete the data it is actually deleted from its place. What exactly happens is with the click on delete OS just lost the address of the data, so it become inaccessible by any applications. But if we wish to recover this data it is simply very easy task with the help of data recovery softwares. But wiping make data beyond recovery no one can recover wiped data even by using most strongest data recovery software. That why after wiping the drive will become as new.

Mac OS X provide free utility to wipe the data using disk utility (present under second tab “Erase”). Wipe the hard drive using any disk utility. By default disk utility will use zero fill algo for wiping. It is most basic wiping algo available. The most strongest wiping algo is 35 passes. It is said that after wiping through 35 passes data no one can even thing about recovery. I would recommend to use third party tool for this purpose (just because my personal experience is once after wiping from disk utility I found three files still remained undeleted) such as Erase Hard Drive (Mac), Disk Wipe, Stellar Wipe etc.

Restore the Image: Now its time to get your Mac back as it was before. Just restore the image you have taken before the wiping and thats all you have actually done it!!

With the surface scan you can test the hard disk for the bad blocks and with the above process you can get rid of unwanted system messages, you can save your data but you can not save that space (surely very less space) in hard disk. The space declared as bad block is actually a waste space no data is going to save there and nothing is going to retrieve from there. But it actually is not going to effect the performance of your Mac OS will just ignore that space for ever.