Reset Bad Blocks that are not bad on NTFS.

[Eric Bodden]

Hi!

My old harddisk had bad blocks so I bought a new one and used DriveImage to
copy the two NTFS partitions. Unfortunately the copy was so good, that even
the state of the bad blocks was copied. So they are now marked as "bad" on
the new drive as well. How can I reset these blocks on my new harddrive?

Thanks,
Eric

--

 

[Eric Gisin]

You mean bad clusters reported by chkdsk? This will happen if you do sector
copy of NTFS or FAT volumes. Doesn't mean you have bad sectors anymore.

Ghost will do a file copy, as would ntbackup.

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

[This followup was posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage and a copy
was sent to the cited author.]

Hi!

My old harddisk had bad blocks so I bought a new one and used DriveImage to
copy the two NTFS partitions. Unfortunately the copy was so good, that even
the state of the bad blocks was copied. So they are now marked as "bad" on
the new drive as well. How can I reset these blocks on my new harddrive?

From a command prompt, do a 'CHKDSK x:' to see if any bad sectors are
still listed. If so, try 'CHKDSK x: /R' to have it read the entire disk
and maybe restore 'bad' sectors to good.

 

[Eric Bodden]

Once upon a time <[email protected]>,

From a command prompt, do a 'CHKDSK x:' to see if any bad sectors
are still listed. If so, try 'CHKDSK x: /R' to have it read the
entire disk and maybe restore 'bad' sectors to good.

AFAIK chkdsk /R only works the other way around (tagging "real" bad sector
as "bad").

Eric

--

 

[Eric Bodden]

Once upon a time <[email protected]>,

Ghost will do a file copy, as would ntbackup.

So you mean if I use Ghost to image this drive to let's say my fileserver,
then reformat the partition (does this remove the bad blocks?) and then
restore the partition again with Ghost that should work?

Cheers,
Eric

--

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Once upon a time (e-mail address removed),


AFAIK chkdsk /R only works the other way around

(tagging "real" bad sector as "bad").

Ah yeah, that would be a bad thing. I wouldn't try that!

 

[Eric Bodden]

So, after about three days I got the problem now solved: I "only" had to use
Linux, patch and compile the NTFS Tools for Linux (in a Ramdisk cause I only
use WinXP on NTFS normally) and run the patched version on my drive. I wrote
a tutorial about how that works:

http://www.bodden.de/misc/ntfsrecovery

Thanks for all comments,
Eric

--