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One method of skipping bad sectors on an iPod's drive
Authored by: ArcadeMario on Jul 06, '10 07:52:41PM

I know I'm replying to a very old thread, but I must give a great big "Thank You" to user djrenekk for this information. It saved my ipod. I also want to provide some help for Windows users who may stumble upon this thread while searching for help with this bad sector problem.

My ipod had lots of bad sector errors. I tried everything, including low level formatting the ipod, performing scans, etc.. I still kept getting errors when attempting to sync with iTunes. Using the information here, I was able to block out the bad sectors, and I am now using nearly all space on my 30GB ipod.

I'm a Windows user, and I automated this entire process. I found that whenever a bad sector was reached, I just had to eject the ipod, and the ipod would reboot itself and then reconnect to Windows. So, I used a utility called DevEject to automatically eject the ipod. I created a Perl script to generate a large batch file that attempts the copies as described by user djrenekk. If the copy succeeds, the file's name is remembered so that I can later delete it and recover the space. If the copy fails, the ipod is ejected, and when it reconnects the script continues with the next file. Here's a sample of the code for one file:

:START4601
echo FILE: 4601
copy DummyFile_10M.txt G:\00_DO_NOT_DELETE_THESE\BadSectorPlaceholder_4601.txt > nul
if ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO :EJECT4601
echo SUCCESS: FILE NUMBER 4601
echo del G:\00_DO_NOT_DELETE_THESE\BadSectorPlaceholder_4601.txt >> GoodFilesToRemove.bat
:: upon success, go to next file
GOTO :START4602
:EJECT4601
echo G:\00_DO_NOT_DELETE_THESE\BadSectorPlaceholder_4601.txt >> FilesFailingCopy.txt
deveject.exe -EjectName:"USB Mass Storage Device" > nul
:REDO4601
:: detect when the ipod is connected again to the PC
sleep 5
dir G:\00_DO_NOT_DELETE_THESE\ > nul 2>nul
if ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO :REDO4601

When the ipod was finally full, I just ran the GoodFilesToRemove.bat script to delete all good files from the ipod. What's left is all of the files that block the bad sectors. I ended up with about 25 files blocking bad sectors all over the ipod's hard drive. I think my file numbers went into the 6000 range. Can you imagine doing this one by one for each file? It would have taken forever. I'd be happy to share the code with any Windows user who needs it.



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One method of skipping bad sectors on an iPod's drive
Authored by: ArcadeMario on Jul 09, '10 12:03:27PM

I created a single Windows command script to perform the entire task of copying files as I describe in my message above. You can download it here:

http://www.dalessio.ws/Misc/detect_ipod_bad_sectors.zip

Please read the top portion for information and configuration. This is not for computer newbies; it is expected that you have at least a minimal amount of knowledge of batch scripts to modify it. I will help you if you need it, but please don't ask me newbie questions like "how do I run a script?", or "how do I edit a file?".

Good luck.

Mario



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